I was trying to set up new storage for my old machines, since I'm still running late IDE drives on them with drive overlay software. The drive overlays will still be necessary, of course, but I can at least use a SATA<->IDE adapter these days.. right?
So I hooked up a 120GB SSD that was on sale for cheap to said adapter and hooked it up to my Presario 4402 box. I ran Ontrack and got it to boot a few times (I think? So many attempts and my memories are hazy at this point), then tried repartitioning and since then have not been able to get the SSD to work consistently on any machine. That was a Pentium box, but I'm getting to the 486 part.
I was frustrated after like 8 hours of hooking things up, formatting, and testing things. Out of the need for more data points, I hooked it up to my Presario 425 and booted to my Ontrack disks. Unlike on the 4402, it reported a drive with no name (and we mean hardware name, here - KINGSTON something or other in this case) that wasn't yet set up (i.e. it saw no partitions/etc.). I hit cancel and looked at the list of drives it saw, and it reported that the disk was 137MB in size (might be remembering the last digit wrong). That's pretty weird!
During boot of Ontrack it spits out some information about the HDD controller and drives attached, and on the 4402 it had been saying 32-bit LBA. On the 425 it said 16-bit CHS. Both machines have the 8GB barrier limitation.
My head is spinning at this point. Before this I'd also wrestled with trying to get SD->IDE adapters working (to find out that lots of them seem to fail to commit changes, including mine, acting as only a read-only drive for some reason), so I'm especially fried.
Has anyone else messed with SATA<->IDE adapters? Even if not, does anyone know if there should/would be a difference between 16-bit CHS and 32-bit LBA when we're talking about using a piece of software designed to bypass BIOS limitations like this?
I've had upward of a 750GB IDE disk working fine in the 425 in the past, so I know it can handle it. I did learn that after 137GB it started to corrupt, so I switched to using 120GB disks in my retro machines. I've had a WD 120GB disk running in my 425 for years now without a hitch, and the same disk boots the 4402 fine.
I'm going to go mess with a 750GB SATA disk I have laying around and see if the specific SSD drive is a problem, but as I understand it should make no difference other than efficiency for the SSD being sacrificed on an OS/hardware that are ignorant of it.
Any input would be much appreciated - sorry for how scatterbrained this post is, but that's just the state my head is in from this mess.
Edit: Checked things out with the 750GB SATA. Remembered that in the 4402 it refuses to boot sometimes with the SATA<->IDE adapter set up (haven't figured out the specific conditions that cause this), instead freezing shortly into booting to a floppy (i.e., one line of text, then freezes with a blinking cursor and may or may not respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del). The 750GB SATA had the same situation on the 425, reporting 131.60MB, which I believe was the same as the 120GB SSD. A detail I left out before (forgot) was that it reports in LBA that it's an 8GB disk in the 425 as well, another difference from the 4402.
By the way, I tried a PCI IDE controller (Promise brand) in the 4402 and it didn't seem to react to it at all. I'm guessing that this 95-96 Pentium isn't compatible with PCI option ROMs, maybe predating them?
So I hooked up a 120GB SSD that was on sale for cheap to said adapter and hooked it up to my Presario 4402 box. I ran Ontrack and got it to boot a few times (I think? So many attempts and my memories are hazy at this point), then tried repartitioning and since then have not been able to get the SSD to work consistently on any machine. That was a Pentium box, but I'm getting to the 486 part.
I was frustrated after like 8 hours of hooking things up, formatting, and testing things. Out of the need for more data points, I hooked it up to my Presario 425 and booted to my Ontrack disks. Unlike on the 4402, it reported a drive with no name (and we mean hardware name, here - KINGSTON something or other in this case) that wasn't yet set up (i.e. it saw no partitions/etc.). I hit cancel and looked at the list of drives it saw, and it reported that the disk was 137MB in size (might be remembering the last digit wrong). That's pretty weird!
During boot of Ontrack it spits out some information about the HDD controller and drives attached, and on the 4402 it had been saying 32-bit LBA. On the 425 it said 16-bit CHS. Both machines have the 8GB barrier limitation.
My head is spinning at this point. Before this I'd also wrestled with trying to get SD->IDE adapters working (to find out that lots of them seem to fail to commit changes, including mine, acting as only a read-only drive for some reason), so I'm especially fried.
Has anyone else messed with SATA<->IDE adapters? Even if not, does anyone know if there should/would be a difference between 16-bit CHS and 32-bit LBA when we're talking about using a piece of software designed to bypass BIOS limitations like this?
I've had upward of a 750GB IDE disk working fine in the 425 in the past, so I know it can handle it. I did learn that after 137GB it started to corrupt, so I switched to using 120GB disks in my retro machines. I've had a WD 120GB disk running in my 425 for years now without a hitch, and the same disk boots the 4402 fine.
I'm going to go mess with a 750GB SATA disk I have laying around and see if the specific SSD drive is a problem, but as I understand it should make no difference other than efficiency for the SSD being sacrificed on an OS/hardware that are ignorant of it.
Any input would be much appreciated - sorry for how scatterbrained this post is, but that's just the state my head is in from this mess.
Edit: Checked things out with the 750GB SATA. Remembered that in the 4402 it refuses to boot sometimes with the SATA<->IDE adapter set up (haven't figured out the specific conditions that cause this), instead freezing shortly into booting to a floppy (i.e., one line of text, then freezes with a blinking cursor and may or may not respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del). The 750GB SATA had the same situation on the 425, reporting 131.60MB, which I believe was the same as the 120GB SSD. A detail I left out before (forgot) was that it reports in LBA that it's an 8GB disk in the 425 as well, another difference from the 4402.
By the way, I tried a PCI IDE controller (Promise brand) in the 4402 and it didn't seem to react to it at all. I'm guessing that this 95-96 Pentium isn't compatible with PCI option ROMs, maybe predating them?
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