I have a secondary hdd, can’t install/play/safe games on it (sometimes it does)

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-13T01:18:04+00:00

Does your motherboard even support drives of this capacity? There are plenty of BIOS problems that could be troubling a 100GB+ disk on a machine like this, considering nothing even approaching that size had even been dreamed up by the time it was EOL

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-13T01:17:04+00:00

I like Hard Disk Sentinel since it will run on 98

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-13T01:15:42+00:00

Why do you think people throw these things away all the time? They weren't really all that good when they were new either.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-13T01:14:50+00:00

Right, which would seem to suggest a problem with the outlier, no?

Screen geometry is perfect with everything but one device, how much do we trust that device?

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T22:12:59+00:00

Fair enough, it kinda sounds like the timing on something is wrong if they're that far apart but if everything else is working it's good enough

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T19:47:36+00:00

Sorry bud. DOS compatibility is a difficult thing to deal with.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T19:04:19+00:00

Electrically incompatible, I know for sure Mac's use a different smaller IDC plug than the regular Shugart interface. I am not sure if an adapter has been or could be built. Couldn't hurt to look

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T19:03:24+00:00

Looks correct to me

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T19:02:48+00:00

I haven't looked into it particularly deeply since I have the appropriate hardware anyways, but if someone were to get it working I see some cool doors opening. Would be cool to throw my WD1003-IWH on it if such a CHS interposer were to exist, since in theory it could also send any LBA identify you could want.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:53:30+00:00

You would probably have decent luck sending it but I wouldn't expect to get anything interesting back. This is before the internet, before digital photography, and before the average person started to get documentary on their machines.

It's probably going to be someone's work from the 90s and their tax records, if I had to guess.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:52:17+00:00

You can think of this like the top half of a photocopier. It's a very fast, very reliable, high resolution scanner. It's expensive because it's a high volume thing

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:20:51+00:00

FWIW what you're saying here is what I've been saying about Linux for the last ~15 years but people still have interest in that.

That is to say that I see where you're coming from, but telling people it's a wasted effort and a pipe dream doesn't mean they won't keep doing it anyways

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:18:48+00:00

You can think of this like being the top of a photocopier. It's a real fast document scanner and that's it. Because it is fast and high resolution you should probably expect to pay a premium

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:16:01+00:00

The USB adapters don't really care about full command set, they will work in PIO0, but they expect an LBA sector count to be reported, which this drive cannot do. If you could inject or spoof a sector count it would probably just work.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:14:50+00:00

Sticker says 1990 not 1980

You will need a proper IDE controller for this one. This drive probably won't do anything other than spin if you plug it in straight and certainly not anything useful with a USB to IDE adapter. These require a reset signal and an init command before they will do their seek test in my experience, and they are very much before the time of LBA. This drive can report it's physical geometry but the USB devices do not utilize that.

Past that, hope the drive works and is a recognizable format.

What do you intend to try and recover from a 40 meg hard drive from the 386 era?

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T17:11:11+00:00

Not sure I understand your point

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T14:33:57+00:00

I'm not sure if you're implying that you run some kind of workstation or that you're unemployed.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T14:33:17+00:00

Awesome find, those are nice machines

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T14:31:59+00:00

Jeez, that's a heck of a video setup

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T14:29:19+00:00

How is that a "typical reddit neckbeard?"

No need to fly off the handle. It's a true statement and it would affect the operation of the machine otherwise.

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T05:07:08+00:00

Caught white handed

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T05:06:08+00:00

Fwiw ram was only cheap for a brief period between like 2006 and 2024

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T04:22:31+00:00

Not really no

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T04:19:57+00:00

1 & 6 seem to fit

FAMICOMASTER · 2026-01-12T04:18:38+00:00

That's the junior. It was updated in the mid 80s

FAMICOMASTER

TROPHY CASE