6 Sep
2009
6 Sep
'09
5:22 p.m.
At 09:09 PM 9/5/2009, Seth J. Morabito wrote:
While they can still be had for free or almost-free if
you look long and hard enough, believe it or not they're getting pretty hard to find.
If you don't have one, you may have to wait a good long while before one turns up (I
looked for about three months before I found a 486 on the local market, and had to pay $25
for it. No, really!)
That's because I threw out twenty cubic yards of them eight years ago. :-)
Fortunately in this case, both of the old computers were still functioning.
For the 386, first I searched for an old IDE drive of suitable vintage and size
that would be recognized by the BIOS that didn't have any allowance
for user-specified drive specs. Then I gave up on that and moved everything
via Zip and floppy.
For the newer, I added a second IDE that was small enough to be recognized
by the BIOS and Windows 98.
I was hoping that someone would've discovered that one of these $30
USB-to-IDE adapters had been made carefully enough to support older
IDE standards... and I can still dream that one of them would allow you
to specify the geometry.
- John