It was a great chat - and it was super interesting to hear from another Starion owner of your experience getting one. Thanks for being on. I really enjoyed it.
For the optical drive issue where you can hear the rotor slip. That's often caused by the wearing down of the rubber or felt grips on the rotor. The bottom one. The top one is more of free floating stabilizer than it is any kind of real grip. I've often been able to fix that rotor slip issue by either opening the drive and putting some electrical tape on the rotor plate, or if I wasn't comfortable with that, adding the tape to the inner most clear ring of the disc. That's usually enough to help the rotor better grip the disc and stop the slippage.
That's great to know thanks! It's strange how it happened on our original machine with low-ish usage. Must be Mitsumi using cheap parts or something. Thanks for the comment!
@@RichsRandomRetroReviews I did post another message where I explained why you were getting different capacity values depending on whether you were in Windows or BIOS, but I guess it didn't go through. I've been having issues where posts aren't posting for some unknown reason.
That post I made yesterday that didn't seem to post, still hasn't. I can see it, but if I open a private window, I can see that it's not visible. I'm not going to write the whole thing out again, but I'll simply state, based on my experiences back in those days, the reason old BIOS' show lower capacities than windows was because old BIOS's used to calculate hard drive capacities based on certain hardware specifications, such as the number of cylinders and heads an HDD had. I don't know what CF used to calculate capacities. I've never worked with it. But there came a point where the cylinder and head counts stopped increasing and capacities transitioned to being calculated based on what they called "max readable sectors". The thing was, in order for you to see the full capacity of the drive, you needed a partition manager that supported it. DiskPart didn't support it and would always show you what the BIOS calculated your drive's capacity to be. But Windows XP's partition manager did and would show you drive's full capacity. This is also why when you installed big hard drives in older computers, (like when I installed a 20GB Western Digital HDD in an old Pentium 1 HP PC I had, the BIOS wouldn't detect the drive. But once I manually configured the BIOS for the number of cylinders and heads, the BIOS would calculate the drive with a really low capacity. Even Diskpart detected it as a much lower capacity. But Windows XP detected the full capacity. The thing is, if you didn't configure the drives cylinders and heads, the drive wouldn't work at all. But once you did, you had to use a Windows installer to partition the drive to achieve the full capacity. And if I remember right, I'm pretty sure Windows 98 SE did too. I don't remember for sure when it comes to the installer, but I distinctly remember running Windows 98 SE on that PC with that 20GB HDD. But I also installed a 60GB Maxtor HDD on a friend's similarly old PC with the same BIOS restrictions. I hope this one posts.
The BIOS on this PC and the IDE controller are VERY basic. The largest drive it will support is 2.1GB. The number of cylinders and heads only goes up so far. You can of course install some software like you mentioned which does some wizardry to allow the full drive to be seen, which I did try out on the recommendation of some guys on the RMC PC and Workstation Discord, but the performance fell through the floor. I think because of the limitations of the machine, I'm just going to leave it as is. It's stubborn and in a way I like that. I appreciate the long comment! I'm always up for learning new stuff like this.
How nice is that fancy set! Good work on the interview Rich.
Thanks so much for having me on! Had a great time catching up and re-living my first Starion experience.
It was a great chat - and it was super interesting to hear from another Starion owner of your experience getting one. Thanks for being on. I really enjoyed it.
For the optical drive issue where you can hear the rotor slip. That's often caused by the wearing down of the rubber or felt grips on the rotor. The bottom one. The top one is more of free floating stabilizer than it is any kind of real grip. I've often been able to fix that rotor slip issue by either opening the drive and putting some electrical tape on the rotor plate, or if I wasn't comfortable with that, adding the tape to the inner most clear ring of the disc. That's usually enough to help the rotor better grip the disc and stop the slippage.
That's great to know thanks! It's strange how it happened on our original machine with low-ish usage. Must be Mitsumi using cheap parts or something. Thanks for the comment!
@@RichsRandomRetroReviews I did post another message where I explained why you were getting different capacity values depending on whether you were in Windows or BIOS, but I guess it didn't go through. I've been having issues where posts aren't posting for some unknown reason.
That post I made yesterday that didn't seem to post, still hasn't. I can see it, but if I open a private window, I can see that it's not visible.
I'm not going to write the whole thing out again, but I'll simply state, based on my experiences back in those days, the reason old BIOS' show lower capacities than windows was because old BIOS's used to calculate hard drive capacities based on certain hardware specifications, such as the number of cylinders and heads an HDD had. I don't know what CF used to calculate capacities. I've never worked with it. But there came a point where the cylinder and head counts stopped increasing and capacities transitioned to being calculated based on what they called "max readable sectors". The thing was, in order for you to see the full capacity of the drive, you needed a partition manager that supported it. DiskPart didn't support it and would always show you what the BIOS calculated your drive's capacity to be. But Windows XP's partition manager did and would show you drive's full capacity.
This is also why when you installed big hard drives in older computers, (like when I installed a 20GB Western Digital HDD in an old Pentium 1 HP PC I had, the BIOS wouldn't detect the drive. But once I manually configured the BIOS for the number of cylinders and heads, the BIOS would calculate the drive with a really low capacity. Even Diskpart detected it as a much lower capacity. But Windows XP detected the full capacity. The thing is, if you didn't configure the drives cylinders and heads, the drive wouldn't work at all. But once you did, you had to use a Windows installer to partition the drive to achieve the full capacity. And if I remember right, I'm pretty sure Windows 98 SE did too. I don't remember for sure when it comes to the installer, but I distinctly remember running Windows 98 SE on that PC with that 20GB HDD. But I also installed a 60GB Maxtor HDD on a friend's similarly old PC with the same BIOS restrictions.
I hope this one posts.
The BIOS on this PC and the IDE controller are VERY basic. The largest drive it will support is 2.1GB. The number of cylinders and heads only goes up so far. You can of course install some software like you mentioned which does some wizardry to allow the full drive to be seen, which I did try out on the recommendation of some guys on the RMC PC and Workstation Discord, but the performance fell through the floor. I think because of the limitations of the machine, I'm just going to leave it as is. It's stubborn and in a way I like that.
I appreciate the long comment! I'm always up for learning new stuff like this.