I had a lot of enjoyment with this one. It does occur to me though that I'm going to need to do something about my camera situation. I film entirely using Samsung Galaxy phones and it always seems like with Samsung they start out nice and crisp but as years go by the cameras start losing focus and the autofocus in particular starts going nuts. Guess I'll start saving for a DSLR. BTW: did anyone get the 'shrimp' joke?
Brad, I think you'll have more luck on round 2. Make sure the drives are all set to primary and then auto detect them all. Seems like sometimes you had them on secondary and maybe didn't auto detect when you changed it back to primary... And of course using the wrong head/cyl can result in an error, simply as it's trying to hit a sector that doesn't exist. As for orientation of the drives, by the point in time, it didn't matter and they would work however you had them positioned. So good luck, I bet you'll get a bunch more to work.
Yes.. off camera I tried various positions for the jumpers.. most were in master or single drive.. sometimes changing to cable select did the job sometimes not. I think the controller on my 486 is being a bit flaky. On the second tower the results got *much* better.
@@TechTimeTraveller In my experience, testing the drives on a USB-Adapter on a modern PC might give you the best success rates. Once you know the drive itself is alive & formatted as it should be, you can still go and try to convince the older PCs to acknowledge it.
@@ShieTar_ I totally agree with this. Especially if using a USB 2.0 (not 3.x) IDE-to-USB device. While you can't (easily) boot the drives this way you can test them very quickly without any need for BIOS HDD settings.
@@TechTimeTraveller There is nothing wrong with anything you did. You did the drive testing the way any of us out here would with what we had on hand to test with, if we didn’t have tons of expensive tools and pedantic software. This video was a great, real world experience that truly captures what it was like in this era in time as if it were a ship in a bottle.
The comedy bits are great and I agree 100% about having the authentic experience of spinning platters vs flash storage. I get that these drives will stop working one day but in my opinion, that’s ever more reason to enjoy them while they’re here. I love the seeking sounds that early voice coil actuators make and the droning sound of the platters in motion.
Ah yes the spin-up and clackity clack of the heads, can't ever erase that sound! One of the things I always do when firing up an old HDD (I've been replacing/upgrading HDDs in Macintosh systems SCSI IDE and SATA since 1996) is to warm it up nice and slowly, to help ease the lubrication of the old and often heat-cooked bearings. To avoid heat stress on other components, I don't use an oven or a heat gun (too vicious), but I either place it in the linen cupboard (next to the gentle warmth of the house hot water cylinder) or in a small room with a fan heater or hair dryer running nearby to blow a gentle stream of warm (not hot) air past the underside/motors until the metal temperature comes up nicely.
Those old HDD sounds and so on really take me back! I loved the video! My first PC was a 486 DX2-66 that came with a Seagate 260 MB HDD. 2 of my friends had PCs at the time and that HDD dwarfed the size of the drives in their PCs at 40 MB and 105 MB. While the Seagate drive seemed quite large for the first couple of years I had the PC I quickly jumped on the Zip drive bandwagon for more cheap space with a SCSI Zip drive in early 1995. I later upgraded that 486 machine with a WD 1.2 GB HDD in 1996 which again seemed pretty huge when I bought it. My current desktop only has a M.2 NVMe drive in it but my NAS has a large array of SAS drives in it which make quite the delightful noise when they're busy!
It still blows me away that you can fit a half terabyte now on a 1 inch long pcie card. And yet, these older drives do seem 'large' in my mind because we were saddled with 30mb for eons and then my first PC, a 286-12 had only 40. Took a long time before I could afford any expansion.
Well that was a fun little romp down memory lane, if also triggering a bit of PTSD...as a WD man for 30+ years, there's just a almost indescribable change in sound they make when they start to fail, and once you've heard it, you never forget, because it would inevitably happen during dead week when you were trying to finish the paper that was 25% of your semester grade. And wow, WFW 3.11...In the 94-95 school year, of the 450 people that lived in my dorm, maybe 30 or 40 of us had our own computers, and probably 85% of those were all using the same copy of Windows. No copy protection whatsoever. Those were the days....
I remember the first HDD I bought. It was a Seagate 120 Gig 2.5inch HDD that I likely payed through the nose for. I needed an HDD for my Amiga 1200, and that only had room for a 2.5inch drive. I bought it, installed it in my Amiga, booted up from floppy and ran the option to install the OS to the hard drive.. After a few minutes, AmigaOS was installed. Even after a full install (which, TBF, was 5 880K floppies, so nowhere near massive). Even after the install, I had nearly 120 Gig free. I had no idea about how I would fill such a massive amount of space.. I don't think I ever did fill up that HDD, even after installing all the software I had. It's amazing, I had 120 gig of storage on my Amiga, and it was massive. I now have many terabytes of storage on my PC, and it's running short of space.
Hard drives have a much greater longevity than many tend to think. If stored properly, many models can last virtually forever. I have some 40 year old hard drives that work perfectly. I have loads of drives from the 90s that work fine, too. Some model ranges like the WD Caviar from 95 to 97 all tend to die on me. But for example Seagate barely breaks on me. On top of that, some drives are repairable. Stuck heads for example
I agree about Windows 95. It was a huge PITA for gaming. That's why there were DOS version of games for so long. The first game I played in windows 95 was Jedi Knight because I was super hype for it and it didn't have a DOS version
Shout out to HiMem! (19:54) - As someone who once bought Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, I was on first name terms with HiMem. The game required 600+ kb of conventional memory. Through months of fiddling and creative use of HiMem. I finally managed to create a boot disk that would leave me with 612 kb of conventional memory.
The PIII was my favorite vintage system. At that point, thing just started working without fussing with jumpers and bios config nightmares. If I set up a vintage PC, that is as far as I would go back other than reviving my old Heathkit H8 CP/M setup; hows that for vintage ;)
Moar drives! Side note, VGA monitors run at 31khz so no worries about the people who complain about the 15khz sound from NTSC/PAL type CRTs. :-) One could call VGA "ear friendly" LOL!
I had a couple of videos with no CRTs present at all and people complained of whine. I wouldn't think it would be PSU or something.. but I'm always paranoid now because I can't hear it and thus can't really test for it unless I break out Spectroid (?) on my phone.
Heh, used to deal with drives a lot back in the day. Likely nothing wrong with your test rig -- things were just more picky at the time. You will absolutely have to auto-detect every drive, every time. On those old AMI BIOSs, some drives will only work when they're set to "master", others will only work using "cable select", very few if any will boot when set to "slave". Good luck!
I'm always really looking forward to your videos! Thanks for doing what you're doing, i like that besides the educational value of your content, your videos are very entertaining. Either of these things could totally stand on their own quality-wise, but together, man, what a package. Thanks!
I would think more of the WD drives from that era would have survived. I had ide drive in the sub 100gb range I think in an external case. It fell out of my truck and spent about 2 weeks getting ground into the mud with me driving over it and horses trampling it. When I found it the external case was gone, the drive itself dented and caked in mud. Once I washed it off it came back to life and ran for another 6 months. It might be fun to try and do some of the old school data restoration techniques on those drives. Freeze them down and/or lightly tap them with the handle of a screwdriver. Some drives like to sit flat or on their side depending on how they were installed. Can try a few and just see if any come to life.
Wow, this brings back a lot of memories. In college I had an internship that involved our lab building a couple dozen boxes for a distributed computing experiments (the AMD K-7s with the Nintendo cartridge looking packaging). The jumpers on the back of the hard drives always had to be checked first because, as I recall, they did not ship with the primary master jumpers set. So that was a pitfall for new students. I also recall even further back: In high school (mid 90s), buying larger WD drives on a discount from the local Fry's, on more than one occasion either I or a friend (I know I definitely had one) got a drive that just absolutely would not boot. Worked fine as a secondary drive, I used mine for years (I may still have it, now that I think about it), but even with the jumpers configured properly the bios wouldn't see it as a primary drive. Our friend group surmised that they had been salvaged from an array of some sort, wiped, and were being re-sold on the cheap (you'd always get them packaged in those silver static bags, and they were usually the cheapest drives they had for sale so we thought we were getting a deal). Some of those might be OK even if you can't get them to boot. Especially if they were salvaged from some other device. The only thing I miss about Win95 is the uncluttered UI. Did a new build for the first time in close to 20 years, and installing from-scratch Windows 11 I was really disappointed with all the clutter that I couldn't customize away.
I have quite a few older PCs with original hard drives. Most are early Pentium era or slightly later. Reliability of these older drives has been really bad for me in recent years. So I decided to backup the good drives, store them and upgrade to something more modern whenever possible. After trying various CF-to-IDE and SD-to-IDE adapters with mixed results I found that a cheap small SATA SSD attached to an addon PCI SATA card has been easily the best solution for me in nearly every case. I love all original systems but I love it more when they boot consistently.
I would recommend making sure they all have the jumpers set to master. Some old IDE drives may not work properly on their own if you have them set to slave, and the computer's BIOS may not recognize a slave drive as bootable.
My quantex 486 came with 3.11 for workgroups. Adrian's from his basement has quite a few of these videos and has some testing software that you might want to look into using for future projects. Great video!
@@TechTimeTraveller It’s a hold-over from the original IBM PC. If the PC had no boot device, it would automagically run BASIC in ROM. Clones didn’t put BASIC in ROM because they didn’t own it and GWBASIC (just a regular EXE) was equivalent.
That "Commodore" mainboard is an off the shelf PCchips model. As the boot screen text string VIP (VESA ISA PCI). Surely there is an upgrade for that BIOS that is text only, I have updated a couple of those, years later, having internet when the bios + flash utility could be obtained, when they were electronic waste. Best wishes.
Yes it's absolutely a PCChips, cobbled together with other parts for what was normally known as a 3dmicrocomputers machine. 3d licenced the Commodore trademarks from Commodore itself, just before it went bankrupt.
I'll never forget buying my first upgrade in 93, a 230-ish MB Maxtor drive. It was when Maxtor; suddenly undercut everyone else's prices by a considerable amount, causing a big tumble in hard drive prices.
I am so onboard with You about hard drives. I remember my first pc had a drive that was loud as hell but I learned that "language". Many drives later I bought my first 80gb wich was way quieter. Now I run ssd´s but I - slightly sometimes - miss those days of raid and scsi. My point: an old rig should have an at least somewhat correct hard drive. Good job, mate!
Many thanks. I appreciate SSDs for current applications. But any kind of solid state tech that isn't vintage just feels wrong on old gear. I really shouldn't be so doctrinaire but on the flipside it does encourage me to hse the hardware more if for no other reason than to try to keep the drives from sitting too long and seizing up.
We had a clone 286-12 with a 40MB hard disk, 1MB of memory and EGA which my father purchased for a *ridiculous* amount of money in 1989. He had two partitions, one for DOS and one for the PICK operating system, so space was even more constrained. I was constantly filling up the disk with my games and even managed to trash the entire thing when one of my more questionable sources "provided" me with the Marijuana virus that, of all things, nukes the partition table. The issue of storage was such a big deal that I took all my savings in late 1992 and purchased a WD Caviar 2250 (250MB) for $670 AUD from the dodgiest of dodgy pop-up computer stores who were direct importing container loads of stuff from Taiwan. Of course by that stage I was already way more of a PC expert than my father would ever be, so I looked like a wizard when I managed to move all of his stuff to the new drive and give him an entire 40MB to play with with his PICK operating system.
Very cool! Our first was a PCjr so no hard drive.. I remember our computer store owner friend cussing out a hard card they tried to get working in a later machine we had. I think it was an XT. Sadly I wasn't blessed with EGA until much later and suffered a lot of envy towards those who did. That would have been an expensive rig back then! Looking back I'm amazed my Dad was willing to shell out like he did. But I understand now why things got traded in instead of simply handing down. Even in 1990 a 5170 was worth something.
GME is Grolier's (sp) Multimedia Encyclopedia... I, uhh, well if I went for a bit of a dig I know the pile and strata/syncline at which my original copy lives... It was basically "budget" Encarta... Also, totally feel you w/r/t "Can still drive a windows box blind from the backseat using only the keyboard, who needs a mouse?"
Man.. Grolier's made me feel so modern.. having all that on a CDROM for pur family PC. A whole library of congress on one disc! Heh. And yeah I sometimes still need those windows keyboard skills when mouse isn't working. Unfortunately some programmers don't bother making that work properly with their own software.
You made me go and look at some of my old drives. 20MB Seagate MFMs and AT/IDE under 100MB, a couple boxes of running used drives pulled for upgrades all the way back to the mid 1980's. I wish I had one of the early 5MB Seagate 5" full height drives I sold for $5000 in 1983/84.
Those 5mb drives are starting to catch on with collectors, although I suspect most are quite dead. 5mb.. it just seems like it couldn't be worth it even then!
@@TechTimeTraveller In the early days of PCs with single density 5 1/4 floppy drives and systems with 64K RAM the 5MB drives were a big deal!!! Made a "turbo" 8088 PC run on par with the IBM system 34 mini computers for single user businesses at a fraction of the cost of a mini computer. One of the biggest mistakes I made selling computers was to tell a school district that my 80286/287 system with a 40MB hard drive was running as fast as their System 34 mini. They didn't believe it, destroyed my credibility and I never sold them a single computer ...EVER...
This was surprisingly entertaining. I had an 80 MB WD caviar when I got my first ever PC (a 486DX 33MHz). It's incredible how much stuff I managed to cram in there. And it was super-reliable. I thought that drive will live forever. Clearly, something is happening with some of the internal parts, which cannot be stopped - I'm thinking the glue holding the head attached to the voice coil arm must be decomposing. Polymers in general can have additives that causes their lifespan to be limited.
You might want to check out the PSU in your commodore pc. Old hard drives will have dry bearings which may cause them to pull a lot more current. If the PC PSU has any leaking caps this will compromise the PSU. My old Amstrad had this problem.
Good thinking. I haven't tested that PSU in a while. Never occurred to me that the drives might be pulling more. An interesting experiment might be to run the ones that work on the p3 for a real long time and then see if any change on the 486?
Some drive controllers might treat the drives a bit differently, especially the boot side of things. When I formatted a CF card on a Pentium II, and installed DOS 6.22 on it, my 386 SX laptop didn’t want to boot from it. I needed to format the card and install DOS on that particular computer.
I found a weird drive from my old 486 that had 565MB formatted after the upgrades from a 386 and a 80MB drive. A really weird capacity considering that it wasn't divisible by 2. The computer we got to upgrade it about 2.5 years later was 1 GB.
probably doesn’t matter much, but I’d run old drives in perfect horizontal or vertical positions. Just in case, gyroscopic effect, additional load on the bearing, etc.
3:20 commodore colt came out in 1988 but with a 7.16mhz turbo 8088 it should have been released more like 1984 or 1985 and used a 286, with atleast meg of ram split in two 640k pages... probably would have sold more, and stayed in business longer
There were quite a lot of 8088s still out there then. I remember repairing an Epson of some sort for a friend that they'd purchased only months before in 1990 or thereabouts. I guess it was to offer a lower price point or something. They were horribly slow at everything though.
@@TechTimeTraveller you'd think by 1988 an 8086 or even a 186 would be cheap enough, and speed up the system, add a custom floating point unit, shit they could have used N80188 with an FPU and a vga chip in 1988 and have a 40MhZ 186 laptop dat can even play games and edit photos! and reads all teh floppies and can use IDE...gotta think by that time 8088 was 10 years old already, you already had 32bit cpu on teh market, if you had a good wallet in 1988 you may even get a custom 64bit cpu or 64bit math coprocessor
xeon and celeron are the oldest cpu they still produce currently, other than i series, then you got server hardware which is a different market entirely, different mobos and socket types and even psu... but you can build a decent desktop using server hardware, just ya know expect it not to be atx ready and have like only one pci or pcie slot... though you can load dem fukkers with 4 cpu sockets and 128GB of EEC ram if you want
get a bunch of servers and build a crypto mining rack, feasible especially using a multi gigabit fiber optic line for internet access to keep dat ping low and be sure my hash results teh first to get paid on dat blockchain, use a solar powered UPS to reduce power consumption to increase profit
My first IBM compatible PC, was a 386DX40, and it came with a 20MB drive. I later upgraded it to a 130MB. The first thing I did was install all my games, just to see if they would all fit, and they did! And I remember thinking to myself, wow I will never have to buy another one with all that space.
I really enjoyed just chilling watching this. Let me tell you though, when I pulled my SGI O2 out of a pile of nonsense it had a 4GB 10K SCSI drive. That thing was so loud we were actually having to talk over it. So maybe it can go a bit too far :/
Oh man.. yeah 10k scsi should have required an advisory for ear protection. I had a client who built a high end workstation with like 6 of them - that thing scared the hell out of me when it powered up. It sounded like at any moment it might just fly apart and take me and half the block down with it.
One Conner drive I had didn't work 'cause someone pushed a PLCC IC too deep into the socket. Had to use a MacGyver Multitool (a paper clip) bent right to pull it from the socket (extraction tools were way too expensive back then). After putting a piece of folded paper under the chip it was seated properly, and the disk was ready to accept Debian, which didn't end up well (not enough space). Still, fun times, and those sounds are just reminding me that 🙂
Up until just a few years ago I had boxes of hard drives and 3.5" floppies left over from my late 90's hacker days. Long since I no longer had anything functional to read the floppies with. I'm a professional musician now and while I was out on tour one of my storage unit "neighbors" managed to flood both of our units and all that data was gone forever. There was nothing in there worth anything to anybody but me, but it still felt like losing a friend, even if it did mean not having to worry about having left some data I shouldn't have had laying around in there.
My first PC had an audio tape player for storage. My second PC had a 40 mb Seagate... I thought it was only 20mb at first, but then I discovered it had been partitioned... that second 20mb was bliss.
Reminds me when I would get boxes of random hard drives back in the late 90's. I would autodetect them and write down the info on a label and put it on the drive so when I used them on a older machine that couldn't autodetect I had the info on hand. I know the feeling to having a real spinning hard drive is better, heck I still use a spinner as the /home directory on my linux machine and a SSD for the root drive. However with old hard drives we have to remember they're just platters of magnetic rust. I've seen drives pass then weeks later end up with bad sectors. Since the hdd clicker came out I thought about it and it needs more. It needs a spinning motor sound to go with it.
some drives (like those early Seagates and some of the Conner drives) don't initialize until the controller receives a command. The WD drives should initialize right away, regardless of BIOS settings, so it suggests you have a jumper issue. That last WDAC1210 was definitely set to slave. (Just pull all jumpers on the WDs for a single-drive master.) I bought a couple of WDAC1210s and they appeared to be dead. Years later, I suspected that the drive cable I used might be bad, and I was right. They both still work today!
Some of the strange behavior you witnessed could have been due to not laying the hard drives flat on the table. I've witnessed head crashes and other miscellany due to drives not being oriented conventionally.
Interesting. I wasn't thinking of that.. I recall some of my former desktop cases had drives mounted at bizarre angles, so I didn't worry about it. I'll make sure I dont do that next time. I did have them sitting like that with the second computer and.. well I don't want to give any spoilers but the results were much better. Many thanks Jim!
@@TechTimeTraveller Most drives by this era did allow pretty much any orientation and we certainly did exactly what you were doing when building new systems and repairs when these were new.
Yes some of the early voice coil drives had settling problems unless they were running with platters level. I think most of the drives in this video should work at any angle. Earlier drives had pretty tight specs on mounting and environmental requirements.
Yeah. In my ms-dos repair days I was cautioned over and over to make sure the orientation of the hard drive stayed flat or vertical. Whichever the machine used.
omg, a Quantum Bigfoot?!?!? I thought _I_ was the only person that bought one of those! Come to think of it Quantum probably thought so too, espeially after they filed for bankruptcy. mine was a 4.3GB and slow as the IRS sending a refund, but it was fast enough for the 386/40 (I think) that I used it with. besides, that was the 2nd drive after my stunningly expensive HP full-height 5.25" 1.2GB SCSI-2 primary drive that I bought a few years earlier for no good reason other than to brag I had one. many more trips down memory lane like this one and I'm gonna have to start wearing a helmet! PS: LOLed all over the place with the "seafood" gags! :-)
Nice video, I also like the sound of old hard drives. But I for myself prefer the faster seek times and the higher reliability of CF cards. Regarding the Master/Slave errors, double-check the jumpers again. Old IDE hard drives had to be in Single Drive mode when being alone, Master is an explicit setting for Master with Slave present (meaning the drive will wait for the slave to initialize before fully initializing themselves). With E-IDE, master/slave mainly became some 2-choice rip-off of SCSI IDs with a master running without slave and slave without master. Typiclly works with later 486 like yours with the AMI WinBIOS (I also had one back in the days and still have the board, aiming to reactivate this) if the drive supports it (meaning not timing out while waiting for the slave). So some drives you did not get to work might still be okay. The model numbers where for most manufacturers pretty easy. First number was either the form factor (3 for 3.5" and 5 for 5.25") or the number of platters (like WD, a Caviar AC1120 was a 1-platter drive) and the remaining numbers for capacity in MB (for IBM before the cryptic names of the Deathstar era, Conner or WD). And as far as I remember, hard drive Megas have always been SI-units (1000*1000). The 1024*1024 is more common among RAM memory and solid-state because of the address lines and the multiples of 2. On the other hand, they could easly have done IT-Megas by dividing Cylinders, Heads and Sectors by 2 due to the 512 Byte sector size.
i had 30mb hdd on a IBM 8086 back then, later started to work on IBM system/390 mainframes with 1GB IBM 3380 disks which is like 64 pounds belt driven ones needs to person to move it arround, cabinet was like 550 pounds. Darn i miss those days....
I see a Microscience HH-325 there, I bet that ended up working. This is an interesting video, I'm sorry I missed it when it came out. I collect vintage hard disks, though not from this era. My stuff is all 120MB and smaller and ends around 1994. I collect the drives with strange designs and weird actuators. The noisier the better.
Hmm, this video connects on so many levels. I need harddrives with the old machines, otherwise something is a miss. My forst PC in 1992 had an unbelievably big Harddrive, a Maxtor with 120 MV, the biggest in the village. Of course I upgraded a couple years later, adding a 1 GB Seagate - aaand PC was completely dead, no post. Teenage me was very upset and dragged it to the computer shop and the guy was just like: "Yeah, Seagate and Maxtor don't work together, didn't you know that?" Got another Maxtor one then. These days I have like 50 of these old drives around and I love the Conners, they sounds so good and almost always still work and the WD Caviar's too. Quantum ones are especially awful, head assembly stuck in rubber goo. And end of last year I tested a whole bunch of SCSI drives. The luxury option of the 90's. It were about 60 from late 80's to some big, comparably modern IBM SCA drives. And they were ALL dead. 60 drives, ALL DEAD. I needed a longer break from the hobby. Here is one of the IBM ones, at least it makes awesome sounds: ruclips.net/video/Z78U1tl-A_I/видео.html
Before you write off the drives in the bad pile, you might want to give them one last chance but don't use auto-detect. Instead, manually enter the drive geometry from the label. I remember having trouble with auto detection and some drives back in the day; some of those drives that didn't auto detect might not support it or have a quirky implementation.
Ah, those Caviar drives hit me right in the nostalgia, my first ever hard disk was a second hand 80MB Caviar I scored from my high school along with a bunch of 486 class motherboards, etc. RE: passwords, when I was a sysadmin and people asked me to reset their passwords I reset it to blank (as in literally b-l-a-n-k) and told them "I've reset your password to blank"
Lol... people are so evil sometimes hahaha. Literally the 'incorrect' password someone pulled on us had us hung for half an hour. He had a perfect poker face.
The "NO ROM BASIC" message is generated by the MBR bootloader from /really/ old versions of DOS if it couldn't find the BASIC ROM which was present on some early genuine IBM systems.... that message means it's trying to boot from the drive, but there's no OS, and your computer is not a genuine IBM XT ;)
My 486 in 1992 had a 340MB Western Digital Caviar hard drive. Thank goodness for Stacker - although I wish I’d known hardware acceleration of Stacker with an add-on card was also available.
@@TechTimeTraveller in that 386/486 era, both Stacker and QEMM386 were practically necessities. But then Microsoft cloned them as MemMaker and DoubleSpace, and not long after that Windows 95 and Pentiums made the whole thing moot. But even then I was nostalgic for the simplicity of MS-DOS especially combined with DesQView for multitasking (which is where QEMM386 got its start as a byproduct).
Some drives had Master, Slave, Cable Select, and Single options on jumpers... some drives were detected in BIOS as Slaves, and it is possible, that Slave drive, won't work without a Master drive on the same IDE Channel, so you need to pay more attention to the jumper settings.
I finally had to replace my original scsi 140mb Connor in my CMD-HD after all these years. Sad the drive was still working but the rubber style bumpers for the read/write head turned to goo making the head stuck to it. Luckily was able to get the drive working enough to copy it to a new ZuluSCSI. Sad day
I think a lot of the "WAIT" drives were because the bios was still set to the previous drives parameters and there was no auto detect. Also, some were coming up as a slave and i'm not sure early systems especially could run a drive set to slave without a master. The drives need to be set to single rather than master as well, master expects a slave drive.
The majority of the drives were set to single. My editing skills are still evolving and I didn't want to get too granular about things. I did try jumpers in nearly every position on the drives that didn't work. I'm pretty sure one of them only started working after I took it from single to slave or CS.. I'm realizing there is so much I've forgotten in 30 years.
@@TechTimeTraveller Did you catch his first point? That BIOS did not auto detect the drives on boot, that is why you had much more success after detecting them in BIOS. That was required every time you changed your drive back then. (Fellow time traveller here.) I have the feeling the master/slave thing was causing you much less trouble.
I don't know what you can do to repair drives of this vintage. @adriansdigitalbasement would probably know better - I don't think they can be safely opened the way earlier drives could.
@@TechTimeTraveller Hm I think that depends. Stupid young me operated a 170MB hard disk with an open window sticker for several years until it started developing problems from getting unfiltered air... "Newer" Conner drives have the same problem as the older ones with the read arm stuck in the parking track, the same fix applies and works. You can even operate relatively modern hard drives (dozens of GB) without a cover for a few minutes not that that's a good idea, mind you. Some of the drives you tested sound like there's been a head crash, these are of course goners, others might just suffer from bad contacts or bad bearings. Sometimes (like Adrian tried) you can swap over the controller board from a dead drive. I did that a few times when controller boards failed. And someone noted that you can indeed low-level many IDE and SCSI drives. Doesn't work for all though. My guess is that the newer the drive is, the more critical alignment is. The guide track most voice-coil HDDs need will help though. Another thing I've seen is good old disintegrating bump stops that turn to oil. Also weird - the failure rate on my old hard drives is relatively low.
I remember being able to distinguish if my Win 95 was using a hard drive in DMA mode or in a fallback PIO mode, just by the sound of the hard drive while booting the system.
I did that with a JVC hard drive from my Toshiba T1200. Worked for 2 seconds and then completely quit. But other drives I can kinda shake or twist around on a certain axis and no problem.. they'll come to life until they're shut down again.
Well this might be too late but on the Conner drives when you hear no seeking just the spin up a normal problem is with a rubber stopper that avoids a shock when the head self park. This rubber turns into goo and the head gets glued to the park position. I had one SCSI 2.5 inch 40 meg one on my powerbook 140 that failed this way and i could totally fix the issue by taking it apart and adding a small piece of electrical tape over the goo that used to be the stopper, that was almost 15 years ago and the drive works fine to this day. Before tossing the drives you can give it a try.
@@TechTimeTraveller Great!, those Conner are very easy to open, just remove the screws on the top and apply force (maybe using a screwdriver) to take the cover off, it has a gasket that sticks with age but you just apply force and is open. Be aware of dust getting on the platters, that can cause real damage, letting it spin forcing the head to the park position can help to avoid any particle settling onto the platter, assembling the drive while the drive is running can also help to avoid particles inside the drive but theres the risk of touching the spinning platter with the cover and cause more damage, in any case old dead drives are fun to experiment unorthodox solutions.
We got in so much teenage trouble for finding out about winpopup when the school upgraded to win95. Having a message popup on every single computer was fun.
I don't remember it at all! But our school was still stuck with Novell then and Windows wouldn't have arrived until after I graduated in the early 90s. I'm not quite sure how exactly it works.
@@TechTimeTraveller Its pretty much a gui for the 'NET SEND' command, which was removed in XP. It can broadcast a message to every computer on the domain or just one PC.
Glad I watched to the end and looking forward to the retool as I bet a lot more work when testing on a P2 or P3, which is 100% what I would use with DOS 6.22. I am not sure why some drives have a spot for Single that is not the same as Master but usually I always make sure the jumper is in Master and not single or off in some of these drives.
Although I edited badly most of the drives started out with jumpering either for single or master.. and then just to test I also tried each other setting. I won't spoil it too much.. I actually swapped to the P3 machine during filming of this video and the results were much better. I just didn't include it here as the video would have stretched to over an hour. But I will do up a followup to show the results.
Strangely enough I think the problem we have with modern hard drive replacements vs. using an old working drive. Is that, in the back of our minds we intuitively know a CF card or an SD card seems less reliable than an functioning old hard drive. Because i have USB flash drives that only last months and i loose stuff often on them. Even more often than i lost anything on any version of a floppy disk.
The jumper for pri or sec has to match where you plugged the drive in on the cable. Even though there is no twist in the cable. Some old drives might require you to enter in the heads and sectors if they don't auto detect. There should be a selection in bios for that. Try multiple PC's from that Era, some drives work better with diffent ide controllers (some of the PC's that I've seen just had a bios that sucked)
Looking at the BIOS, I think jumpers are going to be a cause of a lot of the issues. I know that some drives were very picky about being jumpered correctly, not just master/slave, but also whether they were a lone drive on a single IDE channel - I certainly had an occasion where a drive was jumpered to be master with slave, but there was no slave drive present - the BIOS found the file, but it wouldn't boot until the jumpers were swapped to tell the drive it was solo. Of course, trying to find correct jumper settings on these old drives is a separate nightmare in itself nowadays and can be largely hit and miss - but on the plus side, at least you haven't got the nightmare of any of these being SCSI! :)
Ah yes, the days of losing all your data because a magnet looked at your floppy disc wrong. I grew up in the post-floppy world but still used plenty in my younger years.
I basically automated a full time job into 2 hours a week with a thorough knowledge of PerfectScript in WordPerfect 5.1 and later in Windows. Fortunately it wasn’t MY job.
I like vintage gear, but when I see those old ide cables and power connectors I get mild anxiety remembering how stiff and clunky they used to be, especially power connectors which wouldn't budge. Yuk
Thata the thing you can't relate to young people.. the excitement of a hard drive upgrade.. having to manage space and all that. And how much it cost! These drives just brought it all back for me!
The WD2340 may need to warm up to startup, try a hair drier for 5 minutes then try it (with the driver powered up, reboot after 5 minutes warming, I had a 220Mb one that had that exact issue, it needed to warm up to start during winter)
Back about 1987/88 we had hard drives at the university that had to be parked by manually typing in a dos command. I think it was park c:/ Then in 1989, my boss said we didn't have to do it anymore.
Haha, man what timing - literally going through a huge stack of SCSI/SCA drives to test and initialize for use in my Macs and stuff. Of course, I'm having about the same success rate...
I'm actually amazed at how solid my mac SCSI drives are.. my 160gb SC still works perfectly, and all the Quantum units in my other macs still seem to power up without a hitch.
@@TechTimeTraveller Yeah, the drive from the LC475 I picked up was great, and will be archived and reused, probably in the SE. The problem I find is that many of my macs come without drives, or do have faulty drives. One good source I have found is early-to-mid 2000s SCA drives with an adapter board (doesnt fit in all machines though). The drives are huge for what they are going in, still provide that hard drive sound and feel, and are usually 10K or 15K, and are typically faster than those busses can deal with. Gives you the best of both worlds: a slightly more recent drive, high speed, low access times, and a real spinning disk to give you the feel that you are used to. Of course, those tend to be very used server drives so of course YMMV, hence my situation. Some time with a testbench machine and a sharpie makes it all worth while.
So far I have a Conner 40mb and a IBM 1gb (the conner came from a LC II and the IBM sits in my Power Macintosh 7500), I'm trying to find some cheap SCSI HDDs just in case, but where I live, folks charge an arm and a leg for them. That reminded me, I got a few SCA80 HDDs that I need to test, I just don't have the correct adapters.
As late as 1998 I was saddled with a pair of 200MB Maxtor drives that I kept transfering from a 286/16, 386/40, 486/66 to a Am586/120 around late 98, early 1999 I got upgraded to a 10GB WD when i built my "massive leap forward" AMD K6/2 300 with my mowing money even though I kept using the 200s and most of the other components from the 486/586 were reused. Not gonna point out how i went from DOS 3.3 to DOS6 with Windows 3.0 (legit, Garage Sale) to Windows 3.1 (Ahem) to WIndows 95 (Ahem)..... lol And BTW I love your channel, lmao
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
I had a lot of enjoyment with this one. It does occur to me though that I'm going to need to do something about my camera situation. I film entirely using Samsung Galaxy phones and it always seems like with Samsung they start out nice and crisp but as years go by the cameras start losing focus and the autofocus in particular starts going nuts. Guess I'll start saving for a DSLR. BTW: did anyone get the 'shrimp' joke?
Yes, i have had shrimp a lot, and crayfish once, never have I had pr(aw)ns.
I did not get the shrimp joke 😐
The pr0ns, clearly.
This is a very unique channel. keep up your good work. You are very underrated
38 Minutes of hard drive testing, I can't believe I just watched that, but here we are. Fun as always 🙂
Brad, I think you'll have more luck on round 2. Make sure the drives are all set to primary and then auto detect them all. Seems like sometimes you had them on secondary and maybe didn't auto detect when you changed it back to primary... And of course using the wrong head/cyl can result in an error, simply as it's trying to hit a sector that doesn't exist. As for orientation of the drives, by the point in time, it didn't matter and they would work however you had them positioned. So good luck, I bet you'll get a bunch more to work.
Yes.. off camera I tried various positions for the jumpers.. most were in master or single drive.. sometimes changing to cable select did the job sometimes not. I think the controller on my 486 is being a bit flaky. On the second tower the results got *much* better.
@@TechTimeTraveller In my experience, testing the drives on a USB-Adapter on a modern PC might give you the best success rates. Once you know the drive itself is alive & formatted as it should be, you can still go and try to convince the older PCs to acknowledge it.
@@ShieTar_ I totally agree with this. Especially if using a USB 2.0 (not 3.x) IDE-to-USB device. While you can't (easily) boot the drives this way you can test them very quickly without any need for BIOS HDD settings.
🙄
@@TechTimeTraveller There is nothing wrong with anything you did. You did the drive testing the way any of us out here would with what we had on hand to test with, if we didn’t have tons of expensive tools and pedantic software. This video was a great, real world experience that truly captures what it was like in this era in time as if it were a ship in a bottle.
I absolutely love the "Impossible Mission" reference. "Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay foreverer!" One of my favourites. "Destroy him, my robots!"
The comedy bits are great and I agree 100% about having the authentic experience of spinning platters vs flash storage. I get that these drives will stop working one day but in my opinion, that’s ever more reason to enjoy them while they’re here. I love the seeking sounds that early voice coil actuators make and the droning sound of the platters in motion.
Ah yes the spin-up and clackity clack of the heads, can't ever erase that sound! One of the things I always do when firing up an old HDD (I've been replacing/upgrading HDDs in Macintosh systems SCSI IDE and SATA since 1996) is to warm it up nice and slowly, to help ease the lubrication of the old and often heat-cooked bearings. To avoid heat stress on other components, I don't use an oven or a heat gun (too vicious), but I either place it in the linen cupboard (next to the gentle warmth of the house hot water cylinder) or in a small room with a fan heater or hair dryer running nearby to blow a gentle stream of warm (not hot) air past the underside/motors until the metal temperature comes up nicely.
Those old HDD sounds and so on really take me back! I loved the video!
My first PC was a 486 DX2-66 that came with a Seagate 260 MB HDD. 2 of my friends had PCs at the time and that HDD dwarfed the size of the drives in their PCs at 40 MB and 105 MB. While the Seagate drive seemed quite large for the first couple of years I had the PC I quickly jumped on the Zip drive bandwagon for more cheap space with a SCSI Zip drive in early 1995. I later upgraded that 486 machine with a WD 1.2 GB HDD in 1996 which again seemed pretty huge when I bought it.
My current desktop only has a M.2 NVMe drive in it but my NAS has a large array of SAS drives in it which make quite the delightful noise when they're busy!
It still blows me away that you can fit a half terabyte now on a 1 inch long pcie card. And yet, these older drives do seem 'large' in my mind because we were saddled with 30mb for eons and then my first PC, a 286-12 had only 40. Took a long time before I could afford any expansion.
Well that was a fun little romp down memory lane, if also triggering a bit of PTSD...as a WD man for 30+ years, there's just a almost indescribable change in sound they make when they start to fail, and once you've heard it, you never forget, because it would inevitably happen during dead week when you were trying to finish the paper that was 25% of your semester grade.
And wow, WFW 3.11...In the 94-95 school year, of the 450 people that lived in my dorm, maybe 30 or 40 of us had our own computers, and probably 85% of those were all using the same copy of Windows. No copy protection whatsoever. Those were the days....
Always love the little comedy bits. Makes me chuckle.
Many thanks!
I remember the first HDD I bought. It was a Seagate 120 Gig 2.5inch HDD that I likely payed through the nose for.
I needed an HDD for my Amiga 1200, and that only had room for a 2.5inch drive.
I bought it, installed it in my Amiga, booted up from floppy and ran the option to install the OS to the hard drive.. After a few minutes, AmigaOS was installed. Even after a full install (which, TBF, was 5 880K floppies, so nowhere near massive).
Even after the install, I had nearly 120 Gig free. I had no idea about how I would fill such a massive amount of space.. I don't think I ever did fill up that HDD, even after installing all the software I had. It's amazing, I had 120 gig of storage on my Amiga, and it was massive. I now have many terabytes of storage on my PC, and it's running short of space.
The sound of hard drives spinning up is music to my ears.
Hard drives have a much greater longevity than many tend to think. If stored properly, many models can last virtually forever. I have some 40 year old hard drives that work perfectly. I have loads of drives from the 90s that work fine, too. Some model ranges like the WD Caviar from 95 to 97 all tend to die on me. But for example Seagate barely breaks on me. On top of that, some drives are repairable. Stuck heads for example
I agree about Windows 95. It was a huge PITA for gaming. That's why there were DOS version of games for so long. The first game I played in windows 95 was Jedi Knight because I was super hype for it and it didn't have a DOS version
Shout out to HiMem! (19:54) - As someone who once bought Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, I was on first name terms with HiMem. The game required 600+ kb of conventional memory. Through months of fiddling and creative use of HiMem. I finally managed to create a boot disk that would leave me with 612 kb of conventional memory.
emm386...
The "I love history," during the prawn meeting made me laugh incoherently for 5 solid minutes.
The PIII was my favorite vintage system. At that point, thing just started working without fussing with jumpers and bios config nightmares. If I set up a vintage PC, that is as far as I would go back other than reviving my old Heathkit H8 CP/M setup; hows that for vintage ;)
Moar drives! Side note, VGA monitors run at 31khz so no worries about the people who complain about the 15khz sound from NTSC/PAL type CRTs. :-) One could call VGA "ear friendly" LOL!
I had a couple of videos with no CRTs present at all and people complained of whine. I wouldn't think it would be PSU or something.. but I'm always paranoid now because I can't hear it and thus can't really test for it unless I break out Spectroid (?) on my phone.
@@TechTimeTraveller yeah that's what I use. People don't seem to complain on my videos, maybe my camera filters it out?
Heh, used to deal with drives a lot back in the day. Likely nothing wrong with your test rig -- things were just more picky at the time. You will absolutely have to auto-detect every drive, every time. On those old AMI BIOSs, some drives will only work when they're set to "master", others will only work using "cable select", very few if any will boot when set to "slave".
Good luck!
I'm always really looking forward to your videos! Thanks for doing what you're doing, i like that besides the educational value of your content, your videos are very entertaining. Either of these things could totally stand on their own quality-wise, but together, man, what a package. Thanks!
Much appreciated! I don't pretend to be a pro but I do enjoy the fusion I've achieved here.
Seconded. I know I have something to look forward to when I see anything new on this channel!
I would think more of the WD drives from that era would have survived. I had ide drive in the sub 100gb range I think in an external case. It fell out of my truck and spent about 2 weeks getting ground into the mud with me driving over it and horses trampling it. When I found it the external case was gone, the drive itself dented and caked in mud. Once I washed it off it came back to life and ran for another 6 months. It might be fun to try and do some of the old school data restoration techniques on those drives. Freeze them down and/or lightly tap them with the handle of a screwdriver. Some drives like to sit flat or on their side depending on how they were installed. Can try a few and just see if any come to life.
Wow, this brings back a lot of memories. In college I had an internship that involved our lab building a couple dozen boxes for a distributed computing experiments (the AMD K-7s with the Nintendo cartridge looking packaging). The jumpers on the back of the hard drives always had to be checked first because, as I recall, they did not ship with the primary master jumpers set. So that was a pitfall for new students.
I also recall even further back: In high school (mid 90s), buying larger WD drives on a discount from the local Fry's, on more than one occasion either I or a friend (I know I definitely had one) got a drive that just absolutely would not boot. Worked fine as a secondary drive, I used mine for years (I may still have it, now that I think about it), but even with the jumpers configured properly the bios wouldn't see it as a primary drive. Our friend group surmised that they had been salvaged from an array of some sort, wiped, and were being re-sold on the cheap (you'd always get them packaged in those silver static bags, and they were usually the cheapest drives they had for sale so we thought we were getting a deal). Some of those might be OK even if you can't get them to boot. Especially if they were salvaged from some other device.
The only thing I miss about Win95 is the uncluttered UI. Did a new build for the first time in close to 20 years, and installing from-scratch Windows 11 I was really disappointed with all the clutter that I couldn't customize away.
I have quite a few older PCs with original hard drives. Most are early Pentium era or slightly later. Reliability of these older drives has been really bad for me in recent years. So I decided to backup the good drives, store them and upgrade to something more modern whenever possible. After trying various CF-to-IDE and SD-to-IDE adapters with mixed results I found that a cheap small SATA SSD attached to an addon PCI SATA card has been easily the best solution for me in nearly every case. I love all original systems but I love it more when they boot consistently.
I would recommend making sure they all have the jumpers set to master. Some old IDE drives may not work properly on their own if you have them set to slave, and the computer's BIOS may not recognize a slave drive as bootable.
My quantex 486 came with 3.11 for workgroups. Adrian's from his basement has quite a few of these videos and has some testing software that you might want to look into using for future projects. Great video!
Something about the spin whirrr and click of a mechanical drive is super nostalgic. If I do use solid storage I always at least plug in a HDD.
I don't think we had the language back then but it kinda has ASMR quality.
This was so much more satisfying than loot boxes and roulette wheels. Can't wait for the part 2!
“No ROM BASIC” means there’s a partition but it’s not marked “active”.
Ahhh thank you!
@@TechTimeTraveller It’s a hold-over from the original IBM PC. If the PC had no boot device, it would automagically run BASIC in ROM. Clones didn’t put BASIC in ROM because they didn’t own it and GWBASIC (just a regular EXE) was equivalent.
That "Commodore" mainboard is an off the shelf PCchips model.
As the boot screen text string VIP (VESA ISA PCI).
Surely there is an upgrade for that BIOS that is text only, I have updated a couple of those, years later, having internet when the bios + flash utility could be obtained, when they were electronic waste.
Best wishes.
Yes it's absolutely a PCChips, cobbled together with other parts for what was normally known as a 3dmicrocomputers machine. 3d licenced the Commodore trademarks from Commodore itself, just before it went bankrupt.
I'll never forget buying my first upgrade in 93, a 230-ish MB Maxtor drive. It was when Maxtor; suddenly undercut everyone else's prices by a considerable amount, causing a big tumble in hard drive prices.
This makes me want to buy a box of old hard drives to see whats on them lol
I am so onboard with You about hard drives. I remember my first pc had a drive that was loud as hell but I learned that "language". Many drives later I bought my first 80gb wich was way quieter. Now I run ssd´s but I - slightly sometimes - miss those days of raid and scsi.
My point: an old rig should have an at least somewhat correct hard drive. Good job, mate!
Many thanks. I appreciate SSDs for current applications. But any kind of solid state tech that isn't vintage just feels wrong on old gear. I really shouldn't be so doctrinaire but on the flipside it does encourage me to hse the hardware more if for no other reason than to try to keep the drives from sitting too long and seizing up.
We had a clone 286-12 with a 40MB hard disk, 1MB of memory and EGA which my father purchased for a *ridiculous* amount of money in 1989. He had two partitions, one for DOS and one for the PICK operating system, so space was even more constrained. I was constantly filling up the disk with my games and even managed to trash the entire thing when one of my more questionable sources "provided" me with the Marijuana virus that, of all things, nukes the partition table.
The issue of storage was such a big deal that I took all my savings in late 1992 and purchased a WD Caviar 2250 (250MB) for $670 AUD from the dodgiest of dodgy pop-up computer stores who were direct importing container loads of stuff from Taiwan.
Of course by that stage I was already way more of a PC expert than my father would ever be, so I looked like a wizard when I managed to move all of his stuff to the new drive and give him an entire 40MB to play with with his PICK operating system.
Very cool! Our first was a PCjr so no hard drive.. I remember our computer store owner friend cussing out a hard card they tried to get working in a later machine we had. I think it was an XT. Sadly I wasn't blessed with EGA until much later and suffered a lot of envy towards those who did. That would have been an expensive rig back then! Looking back I'm amazed my Dad was willing to shell out like he did. But I understand now why things got traded in instead of simply handing down. Even in 1990 a 5170 was worth something.
GME is Grolier's (sp) Multimedia Encyclopedia... I, uhh, well if I went for a bit of a dig I know the pile and strata/syncline at which my original copy lives... It was basically "budget" Encarta...
Also, totally feel you w/r/t "Can still drive a windows box blind from the backseat using only the keyboard, who needs a mouse?"
Man.. Grolier's made me feel so modern.. having all that on a CDROM for pur family PC. A whole library of congress on one disc! Heh. And yeah I sometimes still need those windows keyboard skills when mouse isn't working. Unfortunately some programmers don't bother making that work properly with their own software.
You made me go and look at some of my old drives. 20MB Seagate MFMs and AT/IDE under 100MB, a couple boxes of running used drives pulled for upgrades all the way back to the mid 1980's. I wish I had one of the early 5MB Seagate 5" full height drives I sold for $5000 in 1983/84.
Those 5mb drives are starting to catch on with collectors, although I suspect most are quite dead. 5mb.. it just seems like it couldn't be worth it even then!
@@TechTimeTraveller In the early days of PCs with single density 5 1/4 floppy drives and systems with 64K RAM the 5MB drives were a big deal!!! Made a "turbo" 8088 PC run on par with the IBM system 34 mini computers for single user businesses at a fraction of the cost of a mini computer. One of the biggest mistakes I made selling computers was to tell a school district that my 80286/287 system with a 40MB hard drive was running as fast as their System 34 mini. They didn't believe it, destroyed my credibility and I never sold them a single computer ...EVER...
You have PARADOX :-D (at 1:50) I worked years with Paradox 3.5 for DOS in a NOVELL 3.12 network.
This was surprisingly entertaining.
I had an 80 MB WD caviar when I got my first ever PC (a 486DX 33MHz). It's incredible how much stuff I managed to cram in there. And it was super-reliable. I thought that drive will live forever. Clearly, something is happening with some of the internal parts, which cannot be stopped - I'm thinking the glue holding the head attached to the voice coil arm must be decomposing. Polymers in general can have additives that causes their lifespan to be limited.
You might want to check out the PSU in your commodore pc. Old hard drives will have dry bearings which may cause them to pull a lot more current. If the PC PSU has any leaking caps this will compromise the PSU.
My old Amstrad had this problem.
Good thinking. I haven't tested that PSU in a while. Never occurred to me that the drives might be pulling more. An interesting experiment might be to run the ones that work on the p3 for a real long time and then see if any change on the 486?
Some drive controllers might treat the drives a bit differently, especially the boot side of things.
When I formatted a CF card on a Pentium II, and installed DOS 6.22 on it, my 386 SX laptop didn’t want to boot from it. I needed to format the card and install DOS on that particular computer.
I found a weird drive from my old 486 that had 565MB formatted after the upgrades from a 386 and a 80MB drive. A really weird capacity considering that it wasn't divisible by 2. The computer we got to upgrade it about 2.5 years later was 1 GB.
probably doesn’t matter much, but I’d run old drives in perfect horizontal or vertical positions. Just in case, gyroscopic effect, additional load on the bearing, etc.
You could be right. There seems to be mixed opinion there but just to be safe I think going forward I'll keep things 'on the level'.
3:20 commodore colt came out in 1988 but with a 7.16mhz turbo 8088 it should have been released more like 1984 or 1985 and used a 286, with atleast meg of ram split in two 640k pages... probably would have sold more, and stayed in business longer
There were quite a lot of 8088s still out there then. I remember repairing an Epson of some sort for a friend that they'd purchased only months before in 1990 or thereabouts. I guess it was to offer a lower price point or something. They were horribly slow at everything though.
@@TechTimeTraveller you'd think by 1988 an 8086 or even a 186 would be cheap enough, and speed up the system, add a custom floating point unit, shit they could have used N80188 with an FPU and a vga chip in 1988 and have a 40MhZ 186 laptop dat can even play games and edit photos! and reads all teh floppies and can use IDE...gotta think by that time 8088 was 10 years old already, you already had 32bit cpu on teh market, if you had a good wallet in 1988 you may even get a custom 64bit cpu or 64bit math coprocessor
i say that but they made 8086 until 1998 and 186 was made until 2007, outlasted chips that even were its successor
xeon and celeron are the oldest cpu they still produce currently, other than i series, then you got server hardware which is a different market entirely, different mobos and socket types and even psu... but you can build a decent desktop using server hardware, just ya know expect it not to be atx ready and have like only one pci or pcie slot... though you can load dem fukkers with 4 cpu sockets and 128GB of EEC ram if you want
get a bunch of servers and build a crypto mining rack, feasible especially using a multi gigabit fiber optic line for internet access to keep dat ping low and be sure my hash results teh first to get paid on dat blockchain, use a solar powered UPS to reduce power consumption to increase profit
My first IBM compatible PC, was a 386DX40, and it came with a 20MB drive. I later upgraded it to a 130MB.
The first thing I did was install all my games, just to see if they would all fit, and they did! And I remember thinking to myself, wow I will never have to buy another one with all that space.
I really enjoyed just chilling watching this. Let me tell you though, when I pulled my SGI O2 out of a pile of nonsense it had a 4GB 10K SCSI drive. That thing was so loud we were actually having to talk over it. So maybe it can go a bit too far :/
Oh man.. yeah 10k scsi should have required an advisory for ear protection. I had a client who built a high end workstation with like 6 of them - that thing scared the hell out of me when it powered up. It sounded like at any moment it might just fly apart and take me and half the block down with it.
One Conner drive I had didn't work 'cause someone pushed a PLCC IC too deep into the socket. Had to use a MacGyver Multitool (a paper clip) bent right to pull it from the socket (extraction tools were way too expensive back then). After putting a piece of folded paper under the chip it was seated properly, and the disk was ready to accept Debian, which didn't end up well (not enough space). Still, fun times, and those sounds are just reminding me that 🙂
Up until just a few years ago I had boxes of hard drives and 3.5" floppies left over from my late 90's hacker days. Long since I no longer had anything functional to read the floppies with. I'm a professional musician now and while I was out on tour one of my storage unit "neighbors" managed to flood both of our units and all that data was gone forever. There was nothing in there worth anything to anybody but me, but it still felt like losing a friend, even if it did mean not having to worry about having left some data I shouldn't have had laying around in there.
My first PC had an audio tape player for storage.
My second PC had a 40 mb Seagate... I thought it was only 20mb at first, but then I discovered it had been partitioned... that second 20mb was bliss.
Reminds me when I would get boxes of random hard drives back in the late 90's. I would autodetect them and write down the info on a label and put it on the drive so when I used them on a older machine that couldn't autodetect I had the info on hand.
I know the feeling to having a real spinning hard drive is better, heck I still use a spinner as the /home directory on my linux machine and a SSD for the root drive. However with old hard drives we have to remember they're just platters of magnetic rust. I've seen drives pass then weeks later end up with bad sectors.
Since the hdd clicker came out I thought about it and it needs more. It needs a spinning motor sound to go with it.
some drives (like those early Seagates and some of the Conner drives) don't initialize until the controller receives a command. The WD drives should initialize right away, regardless of BIOS settings, so it suggests you have a jumper issue. That last WDAC1210 was definitely set to slave. (Just pull all jumpers on the WDs for a single-drive master.)
I bought a couple of WDAC1210s and they appeared to be dead. Years later, I suspected that the drive cable I used might be bad, and I was right. They both still work today!
Some of the strange behavior you witnessed could have been due to not laying the hard drives flat on the table. I've witnessed head crashes and other miscellany due to drives not being oriented conventionally.
Interesting. I wasn't thinking of that.. I recall some of my former desktop cases had drives mounted at bizarre angles, so I didn't worry about it. I'll make sure I dont do that next time. I did have them sitting like that with the second computer and.. well I don't want to give any spoilers but the results were much better. Many thanks Jim!
@@TechTimeTraveller Most drives by this era did allow pretty much any orientation and we certainly did exactly what you were doing when building new systems and repairs when these were new.
Yes some of the early voice coil drives had settling problems unless they were running with platters level. I think most of the drives in this video should work at any angle. Earlier drives had pretty tight specs on mounting and environmental requirements.
Can vouch for this. Your comment recalled a memory of mine dealing with this in the 90s. Like you said not having them flat can cause problems.
Yeah. In my ms-dos repair days I was cautioned over and over to make sure the orientation of the hard drive stayed flat or vertical. Whichever the machine used.
omg, a Quantum Bigfoot?!?!? I thought _I_ was the only person that bought one of those!
Come to think of it Quantum probably thought so too, espeially after they filed for bankruptcy.
mine was a 4.3GB and slow as the IRS sending a refund, but it was fast enough for the 386/40 (I think) that I used it with. besides, that was the 2nd drive after my stunningly expensive HP full-height 5.25" 1.2GB SCSI-2 primary drive that I bought a few years earlier for no good reason other than to brag I had one.
many more trips down memory lane like this one and I'm gonna have to start wearing a helmet!
PS: LOLed all over the place with the "seafood" gags! :-)
NO ROM BASIC is the message printed via the INT 18H trap, which on IBM hardware jumps to the cassette BASIC in ROM.
Nice video, I also like the sound of old hard drives. But I for myself prefer the faster seek times and the higher reliability of CF cards.
Regarding the Master/Slave errors, double-check the jumpers again. Old IDE hard drives had to be in Single Drive mode when being alone, Master is an explicit setting for Master with Slave present (meaning the drive will wait for the slave to initialize before fully initializing themselves). With E-IDE, master/slave mainly became some 2-choice rip-off of SCSI IDs with a master running without slave and slave without master. Typiclly works with later 486 like yours with the AMI WinBIOS (I also had one back in the days and still have the board, aiming to reactivate this) if the drive supports it (meaning not timing out while waiting for the slave). So some drives you did not get to work might still be okay.
The model numbers where for most manufacturers pretty easy. First number was either the form factor (3 for 3.5" and 5 for 5.25") or the number of platters (like WD, a Caviar AC1120 was a 1-platter drive) and the remaining numbers for capacity in MB (for IBM before the cryptic names of the Deathstar era, Conner or WD).
And as far as I remember, hard drive Megas have always been SI-units (1000*1000). The 1024*1024 is more common among RAM memory and solid-state because of the address lines and the multiples of 2. On the other hand, they could easly have done IT-Megas by dividing Cylinders, Heads and Sectors by 2 due to the 512 Byte sector size.
Wow, I remember a Hilltop BBS in the 908 back in the 90s. I thought that was you for a second. lol
i had 30mb hdd on a IBM 8086 back then, later started to work on IBM system/390 mainframes with 1GB IBM 3380 disks which is like 64 pounds belt driven ones needs to person to move it arround, cabinet was like 550 pounds. Darn i miss those days....
After I lost a term paper at university, I started making backups of my backups. It was a 5.25 inch floppy that had failed. Ms-dos.
Sooooooo Maaaaaaaaany old memories are flowing back to me right now!
my Packard Bell in '94 came loaded with Win 3.11 out of the box straight from Sears
On the flip side you will have some quality scrap aluminum to sell to the metal man. They love those HDD frames - always good quality AL.
I see a Microscience HH-325 there, I bet that ended up working.
This is an interesting video, I'm sorry I missed it when it came out. I collect vintage hard disks, though not from this era. My stuff is all 120MB and smaller and ends around 1994. I collect the drives with strange designs and weird actuators. The noisier the better.
Hmm, this video connects on so many levels. I need harddrives with the old machines, otherwise something is a miss. My forst PC in 1992 had an unbelievably big Harddrive, a Maxtor with 120 MV, the biggest in the village. Of course I upgraded a couple years later, adding a 1 GB Seagate - aaand PC was completely dead, no post. Teenage me was very upset and dragged it to the computer shop and the guy was just like: "Yeah, Seagate and Maxtor don't work together, didn't you know that?" Got another Maxtor one then.
These days I have like 50 of these old drives around and I love the Conners, they sounds so good and almost always still work and the WD Caviar's too. Quantum ones are especially awful, head assembly stuck in rubber goo.
And end of last year I tested a whole bunch of SCSI drives. The luxury option of the 90's. It were about 60 from late 80's to some big, comparably modern IBM SCA drives. And they were ALL dead. 60 drives, ALL DEAD. I needed a longer break from the hobby.
Here is one of the IBM ones, at least it makes awesome sounds:
ruclips.net/video/Z78U1tl-A_I/видео.html
Before you write off the drives in the bad pile, you might want to give them one last chance but don't use auto-detect. Instead, manually enter the drive geometry from the label.
I remember having trouble with auto detection and some drives back in the day; some of those drives that didn't auto detect might not support it or have a quirky implementation.
Interesting. My first play with a hard drive was with my Atari Falcon in 1992.
Ah, those Caviar drives hit me right in the nostalgia, my first ever hard disk was a second hand 80MB Caviar I scored from my high school along with a bunch of 486 class motherboards, etc.
RE: passwords, when I was a sysadmin and people asked me to reset their passwords I reset it to blank (as in literally b-l-a-n-k) and told them "I've reset your password to blank"
Lol... people are so evil sometimes hahaha. Literally the 'incorrect' password someone pulled on us had us hung for half an hour. He had a perfect poker face.
The "NO ROM BASIC" message is generated by the MBR bootloader from /really/ old versions of DOS if it couldn't find the BASIC ROM which was present on some early genuine IBM systems.... that message means it's trying to boot from the drive, but there's no OS, and your computer is not a genuine IBM XT ;)
My kind of specific; first PC hard drives were a Conner 170 MB that was upgraded to a Conner 540 MB
My 486 in 1992 had a 340MB Western Digital Caviar hard drive. Thank goodness for Stacker - although I wish I’d known hardware acceleration of Stacker with an add-on card was also available.
I think I had Stacker at one point before going to doublespace. I remember stacker giving a performance hit but doublespace I can't recall.
@@TechTimeTraveller in that 386/486 era, both Stacker and QEMM386 were practically necessities. But then Microsoft cloned them as MemMaker and DoubleSpace, and not long after that Windows 95 and Pentiums made the whole thing moot. But even then I was nostalgic for the simplicity of MS-DOS especially combined with DesQView for multitasking (which is where QEMM386 got its start as a byproduct).
Some drives had Master, Slave, Cable Select, and Single options on jumpers... some drives were detected in BIOS as Slaves, and it is possible, that Slave drive, won't work without a Master drive on the same IDE Channel, so you need to pay more attention to the jumper settings.
I used SCSI then. I had a killer 340 meg drive on my Mac Plus with a 256 grey card and eithernet.
I finally had to replace my original scsi 140mb Connor in my CMD-HD after all these years. Sad the drive was still working but the rubber style bumpers for the read/write head turned to goo making the head stuck to it. Luckily was able to get the drive working enough to copy it to a new ZuluSCSI. Sad day
thats funny you picked Bucks County PA and thats where I live.. haha
I think a lot of the "WAIT" drives were because the bios was still set to the previous drives parameters and there was no auto detect. Also, some were coming up as a slave and i'm not sure early systems especially could run a drive set to slave without a master. The drives need to be set to single rather than master as well, master expects a slave drive.
The majority of the drives were set to single. My editing skills are still evolving and I didn't want to get too granular about things. I did try jumpers in nearly every position on the drives that didn't work. I'm pretty sure one of them only started working after I took it from single to slave or CS.. I'm realizing there is so much I've forgotten in 30 years.
@@TechTimeTraveller Did you catch his first point? That BIOS did not auto detect the drives on boot, that is why you had much more success after detecting them in BIOS. That was required every time you changed your drive back then. (Fellow time traveller here.) I have the feeling the master/slave thing was causing you much less trouble.
Now let's see how many of the dead drives are easily repairable
I don't know what you can do to repair drives of this vintage. @adriansdigitalbasement would probably know better - I don't think they can be safely opened the way earlier drives could.
@@TechTimeTraveller Hm I think that depends. Stupid young me operated a 170MB hard disk with an open window sticker for several years until it started developing problems from getting unfiltered air...
"Newer" Conner drives have the same problem as the older ones with the read arm stuck in the parking track, the same fix applies and works. You can even operate relatively modern hard drives (dozens of GB) without a cover for a few minutes not that that's a good idea, mind you.
Some of the drives you tested sound like there's been a head crash, these are of course goners, others might just suffer from bad contacts or bad bearings. Sometimes (like Adrian tried) you can swap over the controller board from a dead drive. I did that a few times when controller boards failed.
And someone noted that you can indeed low-level many IDE and SCSI drives. Doesn't work for all though.
My guess is that the newer the drive is, the more critical alignment is. The guide track most voice-coil HDDs need will help though.
Another thing I've seen is good old disintegrating bump stops that turn to oil.
Also weird - the failure rate on my old hard drives is relatively low.
I remember being able to distinguish if my Win 95 was using a hard drive in DMA mode or in a fallback PIO mode, just by the sound of the hard drive while booting the system.
sometimes a little horizontal shock can also get a drive head assembly back to life - for those which just spin and don't seek.
I did that with a JVC hard drive from my Toshiba T1200. Worked for 2 seconds and then completely quit. But other drives I can kinda shake or twist around on a certain axis and no problem.. they'll come to life until they're shut down again.
That mfm drive looks like a hardcard - a controller and drive in a single ISA slot. I had 1 from the mid 80s to the early 90s.
I betcha "GME" on the Win 3.11 machine was Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. It needed a CD.
Well this might be too late but on the Conner drives when you hear no seeking just the spin up a normal problem is with a rubber stopper that avoids a shock when the head self park. This rubber turns into goo and the head gets glued to the park position. I had one SCSI 2.5 inch 40 meg one on my powerbook 140 that failed this way and i could totally fix the issue by taking it apart and adding a small piece of electrical tape over the goo that used to be the stopper, that was almost 15 years ago and the drive works fine to this day. Before tossing the drives you can give it a try.
Thanks for this! I will give this a try. I never toss stuff these days so I still have the drives. I just wasn't sure how to open it up.
@@TechTimeTraveller Great!, those Conner are very easy to open, just remove the screws on the top and apply force (maybe using a screwdriver) to take the cover off, it has a gasket that sticks with age but you just apply force and is open. Be aware of dust getting on the platters, that can cause real damage, letting it spin forcing the head to the park position can help to avoid any particle settling onto the platter, assembling the drive while the drive is running can also help to avoid particles inside the drive but theres the risk of touching the spinning platter with the cover and cause more damage, in any case old dead drives are fun to experiment unorthodox solutions.
37:00 this Seagate looks to be detected as slave (D:) and then after jumpers check not detected again as master. Check jumpers + detect again?
We got in so much teenage trouble for finding out about winpopup when the school upgraded to win95. Having a message popup on every single computer was fun.
I don't remember it at all! But our school was still stuck with Novell then and Windows wouldn't have arrived until after I graduated in the early 90s. I'm not quite sure how exactly it works.
@@TechTimeTraveller Its pretty much a gui for the 'NET SEND' command, which was removed in XP. It can broadcast a message to every computer on the domain or just one PC.
Looks like Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (21:48)
Glad I watched to the end and looking forward to the retool as I bet a lot more work when testing on a P2 or P3, which is 100% what I would use with DOS 6.22. I am not sure why some drives have a spot for Single that is not the same as Master but usually I always make sure the jumper is in Master and not single or off in some of these drives.
Although I edited badly most of the drives started out with jumpering either for single or master.. and then just to test I also tried each other setting. I won't spoil it too much.. I actually swapped to the P3 machine during filming of this video and the results were much better. I just didn't include it here as the video would have stretched to over an hour. But I will do up a followup to show the results.
@@TechTimeTraveller cool! Looking forward to it. Keep up the good work.
32:49.... i laughed so hard... that is true humor!
Strangely enough I think the problem we have with modern hard drive replacements vs. using an old working drive. Is that, in the back of our minds we intuitively know a CF card or an SD card seems less reliable than an functioning old hard drive. Because i have USB flash drives that only last months and i loose stuff often on them. Even more often than i lost anything on any version of a floppy disk.
Actually a have pretty nice memories about Win95... OSR2. Original was real trainwreck of early beta version.
Dr. Evil demands ONE HUNDRED MILLION BYTES.
(yes I know a mb is 1024 kb not 1000, don't @ me)
The jumper for pri or sec has to match where you plugged the drive in on the cable. Even though there is no twist in the cable.
Some old drives might require you to enter in the heads and sectors if they don't auto detect. There should be a selection in bios for that.
Try multiple PC's from that Era, some drives work better with diffent ide controllers (some of the PC's that I've seen just had a bios that sucked)
Looking at the BIOS, I think jumpers are going to be a cause of a lot of the issues. I know that some drives were very picky about being jumpered correctly, not just master/slave, but also whether they were a lone drive on a single IDE channel - I certainly had an occasion where a drive was jumpered to be master with slave, but there was no slave drive present - the BIOS found the file, but it wouldn't boot until the jumpers were swapped to tell the drive it was solo.
Of course, trying to find correct jumper settings on these old drives is a separate nightmare in itself nowadays and can be largely hit and miss - but on the plus side, at least you haven't got the nightmare of any of these being SCSI! :)
Ah yes, the days of losing all your data because a magnet looked at your floppy disc wrong. I grew up in the post-floppy world but still used plenty in my younger years.
I basically automated a full time job into 2 hours a week with a thorough knowledge of PerfectScript in WordPerfect 5.1 and later in Windows. Fortunately it wasn’t MY job.
I like vintage gear, but when I see those old ide cables and power connectors I get mild anxiety remembering how stiff and clunky they used to be, especially power connectors which wouldn't budge. Yuk
Before I even begin I will say "probably not"
In my limited experience, that era of WD was only surpassed in unreliability by the 2-8 GB Caviar drives.
I remember upgrading my 60MB MFM drive to a 230MB IDE drive. I thought I would never fill it up.
Thata the thing you can't relate to young people.. the excitement of a hard drive upgrade.. having to manage space and all that. And how much it cost! These drives just brought it all back for me!
The WD2340 may need to warm up to startup, try a hair drier for 5 minutes then try it (with the driver powered up, reboot after 5 minutes warming, I had a 220Mb one that had that exact issue, it needed to warm up to start during winter)
1st one, not the clunk of death one
Back about 1987/88 we had hard drives at the university that had to be parked by manually typing in a dos command. I think it was park c:/
Then in 1989, my boss said we didn't have to do it anymore.
Haha, man what timing - literally going through a huge stack of SCSI/SCA drives to test and initialize for use in my Macs and stuff. Of course, I'm having about the same success rate...
I'm actually amazed at how solid my mac SCSI drives are.. my 160gb SC still works perfectly, and all the Quantum units in my other macs still seem to power up without a hitch.
@@TechTimeTraveller Yeah, the drive from the LC475 I picked up was great, and will be archived and reused, probably in the SE. The problem I find is that many of my macs come without drives, or do have faulty drives. One good source I have found is early-to-mid 2000s SCA drives with an adapter board (doesnt fit in all machines though). The drives are huge for what they are going in, still provide that hard drive sound and feel, and are usually 10K or 15K, and are typically faster than those busses can deal with. Gives you the best of both worlds: a slightly more recent drive, high speed, low access times, and a real spinning disk to give you the feel that you are used to. Of course, those tend to be very used server drives so of course YMMV, hence my situation. Some time with a testbench machine and a sharpie makes it all worth while.
So far I have a Conner 40mb and a IBM 1gb (the conner came from a LC II and the IBM sits in my Power Macintosh 7500), I'm trying to find some cheap SCSI HDDs just in case, but where I live, folks charge an arm and a leg for them.
That reminded me, I got a few SCA80 HDDs that I need to test, I just don't have the correct adapters.
I'll always remember a buck a meg and then when scsi hit the same level.
The noises... Holy mother of boards, they make sooooo nervous.....
As late as 1998 I was saddled with a pair of 200MB Maxtor drives that I kept transfering from a 286/16, 386/40, 486/66 to a Am586/120 around late 98, early 1999 I got upgraded to a 10GB WD when i built my "massive leap forward" AMD K6/2 300 with my mowing money even though I kept using the 200s and most of the other components from the 486/586 were reused.
Not gonna point out how i went from DOS 3.3 to DOS6 with Windows 3.0 (legit, Garage Sale) to Windows 3.1 (Ahem) to WIndows 95 (Ahem)..... lol And BTW I love your channel, lmao
MetroScan and Lucero would had been VERY expensive back then.