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Interesting... I think you just helped me figure something (admittedly rather simple) out. Quite trivial (not nearly as interesting as your experience), but mil
by exikyut 9y ago
Interesting... I think you just helped me figure something (admittedly rather simple) out. Quite trivial (not nearly as interesting as your experience), but mildly related.
Many years ago I happened to find an ancient-looking machine buried in a spare room at a church. I think the room was occasionally used as an ad-hoc creche area.
After finally locating an IEC cable for it and finally getting it to boot, I found that it was of the opinion it didn't have any HDDs attached.
So, I went into the BIOS, and - yes! Just old enough to require manual CHS configuration, but juuust new enough to have a manual autodetect routine!
Turned out it was a cute 25MHz-or-so (IIRC) 486 with something like a 200MB HDD. Had some demos on it that I've long forgotten the names of. Was fun to find that machine.
Despite being so trivial that no conveniently-placed homemade rescue labels were needed, the people there also wondered how I'd figured out what was wrong with it as well.
(Honestly, I really want to work somewhere everybody's still using ancient equipment. Partly because it's what I've been exposed to for most of my life and I really like it, and partly because I'm still yet to have the chance to acclimatize to newer stuff and almost all of the small bit of knowledge I've accumulated covers older tech.)
Regarding what you helped me figure out, I've been wondering for years why that BIOS decided it didn't have a HDD. Initially I thought the HDD was on the way out and decided not to show up one day, and the BIOS happily deregistered it [after someone saw an indecipherable POST error and hit F1 or whatever]. Now I wonder if maybe the rechargeable battery went flat after the machine was left off for ages, then someone turned it on, hit F1 to accept the "bad CRC" error (I never saw one) and didn't know to do an autodetect for the HDD. It's possible. I know some BIOSes remember "time wasn't re-set after fail"; I never saw a time POST error, and don't remember if I checked the clock to see if it was wrong.