Finally, a LUNCHBOX!

[Paralel]

Ugh, Windows 95, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. That thing was more a conglomeration of bugs held together with tape than an actual OS.

Windows ME was the only MS OS to beat 95 in terms of how bad it was. At least they actively worked to fix 95, ME was just left to flop around like a 1/2 dead fish. I always laughed when people complained about Vista. I was like "Until you've had to deal with the first release of Win 95, or Windows ME, you have no idea what bad really is!"

 

[Gorgonops]

I'm wondering about that ESDI part, I tried an IDE drive on the bus and came up with absolutamente nada!

You'd know if you had an ESDI drive when you saw it, the cabling is completely different from IDE.

By any chance do you know what the brand/model number of the disk that's in it is? Also... did you try going into the BIOS setup, or did you just plug the new drive in and assume it would be autodetected? To digress quite a long way, well... you know the phrase "SCSI Voodoo"? When you're dealing with a machine as old as this you're going to encounter quite a bit of "IDE Voodoo". Amongst which:

A: Just to be certain, you have the drive you're trying hard-jumpered as "master", not "cable-select"?

B: The BIOS may not do autodetect, at least completely automatically. You'll probably have to drop into the BIOS and either:

1: Tell it to Autodetect (some BIOSes which *can* do it don't do it unless told), which may or may not work (* I'll get back to that), or if you're really unlucky:

2: Manually enter a C/H/S (cylinders/heads/sectors) sequence to describe the capacity of the drive you connected. I say "C/H/S" and not just an LBA capacity because:

C: This BIOS *will* have problems with drives larger than X, X being a number that could vary anywhere between 528MB and 8GB. A lot changed between about 1993 and 1998, a system produced between those years could have its personal limit stuck anywhere in that range; for a 486DX the most likely numbers are 528MB and 2.1GB. It's possible the BIOS in your system is so old it doesn't even know how to meaningfully detect a drive (IE, it doesn't know the "Geometry" command at all, and therefore drive setup is completely manual), or it could be running the command against whatever drive you plugged in and getting an answer that makes it wet its pants. (How large of a drive did you try?)

(Edit: A history of BIOS drive size limits )

There are solutions for running big drives in systems like this; the most common is to use a "Disk Manager"; a common one was "EZ Drive", which used to be included with Maxtor and Western Digital drives on a floppy. They way they work is you set the BIOS up for the biggest size it supports (in your case, probably 528MB), and then use disk manager to install in the boot sector area a BIOS extension that gets loaded and "fixes" the problem (IE, it queries the disk's real size and sets up its substitute INT13 driver to use it) before booting an OS. Minus a disk manager your options are probably limited to using a drive smaller than the BIOS limit or using a larger drive and accepting that you won't be able to use part of it. (Note that the second case may only be an option if the larger-size drive doesn't crash the autodetection, if present. *If* it does then try disabling autodetect and manually punching in a size.)

Back in the day EZ Drive was great, and let you do all sorts of horrible off-the-radar things. I used it once, a copy that was provided with a new Maxtor drive, to set up a 486DX/33 with a really OLD bios to drive *three* castoff hard disks. All the disks were smaller than 528MB, but the old BIOS only supported a single IDE port. (IE, two drive maximum) The EZ Drive BIOS extension was smart enough to look for drives at secondary and tertiary ports, so I was able to hang the third HD off the IDE port on a Soundblaster card. The resulting Frankenstein machine even worked under OS/2. It looks like it's possible to download a copy of EZ Drive from Western Digital support, the one thing I'd worry about is if they since brain-damaged it so it only works with WD hard drives.

A system like this *would* probably be a good candidate for an IDE->Compactflash adapter, teamed up with a 2GB or smaller CF card. (Or heck, a 512MB card would be perfect.) Most CF cards still support C/H/S mode so it should be pretty much plug-and-play.

 

[Gorgonops]

I tried Windows 95 on a 486 someone gave me. Previously, all my experiences of 95 have been good overall, even a 300 MHz AMD K6 (aka NEC Ready 230T) seemed relatively speedy. But the 486, My Gosh! That thing was sooo sloww! I never believed Windows 95 could be that slow.

I've actually witnessed Windows 95 on a 20mhz 386SX with 8MB of RAM. Just poking around the UI it honestly didn't seem... any worse than Windows 3.1, but that really isn't saying anything. I'm sure actually running anything significant would have torpedoed it.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Thanks for the help, g. I've done the manual C/H/S dance back in the day and I still have Upgrading and Repairing PCs on the bookshelf. IDE did hook up to the cable with no problem, so you were right about the setup sequence report being a red herring.

No way I can get the &^%$^%#%$ HDD out of the box without major surgery, heck I could barely get the cable off it, the PSU wire terminators are in the way and that motherloving MOLEX connection fit is so tight that I've excavated a splitter and tossed it into the thing for installation during next evolution in this campaign.

I'm loving that compact flash suggestion. There's also the SCSI option, but I haven't relocated my ISA controller as yet.

I've backburnered taming the BEAST for now. I dug a good Win98 candidate for the ROM burner build out of the MoBo box! ;D

 

[jruschme]

No way I can get the &^%$^%#%$ HDD out of the box without major surgery

It looks like you need to somehow take off the case plastics, at least on the side nearest the HDD. That probably leaves either an opening or screws which hold the drive bracket in place.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Ahem, getting the plastics off would be the major surgery I'm talking about, I've gotta find a take-apart to download. [] ]'>

 

[techknight]

Ugh, Windows 95, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. That thing was more a conglomeration of bugs held together with tape than an actual OS.
Windows ME was the only MS OS to beat 95 in terms of how bad it was. At least they actively worked to fix 95, ME was just left to flop around like a 1/2 dead fish. I always laughed when people complained about Vista. I was like "Until you've had to deal with the first release of Win 95, or Windows ME, you have no idea what bad really is!"

You know, The funny thing is I never had any issues with any version of 95. Yea, it had quite a few BSODs or illegal operations, but that was pretty rare for me. And Win98 had about the same number of those for me as well. Win ME, I had absolutely no issues with when I used it, Surprisingly. But I didnt do a whole lot with it, other than browsing the web and burning CDs, plus using the old Scour media exchange, I also have 2 pressed beta CDs from when I was in the Win ME Beta program. Even got my win2000 beta CD too. lol. Back in those days, you had to be invited in to do the Beta stuff. I got the WinME Beta invite, my buddy got the Win2K and Win2K3 Server invite.

 

[markyb86]

Windows 95 as bad as ME?

Windows 98 has Internet Explorer integrated. It started the "internetizing" of Windows which made it more buggy and less productive.

You can't get a '404 page not found' while browsing your hard drive in Windows 95, lol.

 

[CC_333]

Windows 98 has Internet Explorer integrated. It started the "internetizing" of Windows which made it more buggy and less productive.

This is true.
However, it would seem that by the time Windows XP had matured (about when Service Pack 2 was released, I think), the concept of an integrated web browser actually began to sort of work OK in practice (i.e., it wasn't as bug ridden as in previous releases, though it could've still used some improvement; hence Windows Vista (in my opinion the most XP like of the various post-XP versions) and later Windows 7 (probably the best Windows to date, and finally a valid improvement over XP (Vista was basically, at first, a badly executed interim release; however, in its defense, it did mature into a decent OS.)).

I'm not trying to defend the "internetization" of Windows per se- I for one think that Microsoft didn't do anyone any favors by doing it (by way of intentionally (if I recall correctly) blocking Netscape from running on 98 (and unscrupulously usurping the various third party technologies it perceived as competing with Windows* (the so called anti competitive behavior)).

Be that as it may, I actually like Windows 98 okay (though 95 is arguably better due to its simpler interface; if it were to include an NT kernel, it would, in principle, be relatively more stable and reliable I think (wait, we already have that: Windows NT 4! Too bad it didn't have all the niceties that 2000 had (minus the webby interface, of course.))).

So, that being said, I will now bow out before I get myself stuck in a hole.

c

*Apple isn't a saint here, either, though they weren't so anti competitive and unscrupulous as MS, anyway (case in point: The acquisition of NeXTStep, which evolved into the OS X we know today, wouldn't have happened if Apple hadn't bought the company that produced it (NeXT); their attempt at an in-house solution (Copeland) was a disaster, and it most certainly would've put Apple out of business if it had floundered much longer than it did).

 

[Paralel]

I don't know that I would be that kind regarding Apple and how it treated its competition. Remember what they did to the Apple clone market. They used a legal loophole to destroy all the Apple clones in one fell swoop. If that isn't anti-competitive, I don't know what is.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

After messing with Ankylosaurus the other Parallel Port ROM HackStation candidate a bit too long and way too much hardware cannibalization later, I suffered a middling vicious case bite on my leg . . .

. . . YOWCH!!!!! 8-o

An alcohol swabbing and Bacitracin schmear later, I decided it was time to bolt a lot of nasty sheet metal back together and clean up the work area and made a possible breakthrough for both ROMstation candidate systems in the process, especially the BEAST from Tekelec.

I found the Zip-Loc with the setup floppy/partitioning kit from one of my Western Digital HDDs therein . . .

. . . but I'm still gonna' clean up and organize the considerable heaps of digital offal surrounding the MacHackStation before going any farther with this lunchbox beauty.

 

[Bunsen]

I don't know that I would be that kind regarding Apple and how it treated its competition. Remember what they did to the Apple clone market. They used a legal loophole to destroy all the Apple clones in one fell swoop. If that isn't anti-competitive, I don't know what is.

You misunderstand the purpose of antitrust legislation. It is to prevent anti-competitive practice by monopolies and near-monopolies, where their market dominance can be abused to distort the market itself. It doesn't apply without that dominance. Comparing MS's practices and Apple's is thus irrelevant.

*Apple isn't a saint here, either / (case in point: The acquisition of NeXTStep

This has zero to do with anti-competitive practices, and I fail to see how it's in any way unethical or questionable. Their in-house OS development stalled, yes; so what? They acquired an outside solution, including the company that produced it; so what?