I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it’s running from the floppy and doesn’t need to be installed first.
If you guys are interested, I’ll post it running some things tomorrow. There’s a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that’s a possibility on 6MB of RAM.
Oh that’s awesome. I love the tick tick tick read sound on those 5.25s. Yeah some flavor of linux will run on it I’d bet. If not, a 50Mb HDD would be plenty anyway :)
Edit: well someone did it, anyway! https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/the-latest-linux-on-a-floppy-in-a-486/
Yea this thing needs a new drive. Trying to run any programs on it gives me read errors. I need to figure out what linux it could run. I’m comfortable with linux, but not with this kind of hardware.
not that you shouldn’t replace the drive anyway, but…
depending on the drive epoch (I am guessing its ide/ata not ST-506) you could try a factory format. with the right drive and phase of the moon, the on-drive controller may actually go off and do it for real instead of faking it. its usually worth a try an old drive just for funsies.
I want to see what (if anything) i can copy from the drive, and then I’ll give this a shot and see how much mileage I can get out of it!
Oh yeah, that’s a real piece of crap you got there. I’m amazed they even started up.
Is it bad? 😂 I don’t know anything about these old machines, but it works and I’ll see how much I can do with it.
They were terrible PCs built from substandard parts and sold for much more than they were worth
Ah, I think I did read that somewhere. This one is still kicking though. I dug it out of my brother’s attic last year and finally got around to powering it on.
Some suggestions for solid state alternatives as old mechanical magnetic storage has such a high failure rate. But retro whatever way you want, of course!
You can get ide to compact flash or ide to sata adapters and get some reasonably modern solid state hard drive storage in there, if that interests you. I understand (haven’t tried personally) that compatibility can be kind of a crapshoot though.
You can also get a gotek which has a floppy interface and can load floppy images from a USB thumbdrive. Which might be a more functional option than getting a USB floppy drive for a modern machine.
The gotek looks like a cool way to add usb storage support. I’m hesitant only because this thing boots from the 3.5" drive right now so I don’t want to touch that, but if I fix the hard drive problems and it boots from there then I might do this.
I do want to get an SSD in here, a friend of mine has done it before on a similarly old windows 98 system.
This is the first time I’ve seen a machine with both a 5.25 floppy disk drive and a CD drive. It wasn’t like that stock, was it?
NetBSD (i386) should run fine on that box.
I’m curious how well CDDA (you may need to compile it from source) runs on that.
I can try it out once i learn how to use this thing. I’m gonna have to get a usb floppy reader/writer to copy stuff from a modern computer.
If you need a hand with anything this era of computers was what I learned on. So feel free to msg me.
Right now the challenge is to get data off of my 5.25" floppy disks. Online shops are full of 3.5" to usb readers, but nothing for 5.25".
The reader in the computer still works.
I’m considering trying to send files out through the serial port, if I can figure out how to send a file to it. Then I could use anything to read from the other end of the serial port and write the file.
