As you most likely won't remember, my family has an old PC downstairs. It runs Win95, its levels of free memory tend to hover under 100 MB (and I'm doubtful about that much because there seem to be a lot of bad sectors), there's no CD burner or ZIP drive connected . . . but we keep it for the games we can play in Shutdown MS-DOS, so replacing it with a modern computer is not an option at this point . Now, my brother dug up an old HD and keyboard the other day. Someone gave it to us years ago, so I don't know the specs right off (my brother thinks it has Win95 installed as well, but it might be Win98), except that it ought to have at least a few hundred MB free memory space . It would be really nice to be able to take advantage of this somehow. Being a total n00b at this sort of thing, my fundamental question is: How best can we get those two chunks of free space together? Can we just link the hard drives together somehow and let the "new" one act as a new, separate drive in the current setup? Would there be anything we'd need to watch out for, like different processor speeds or formatting one of the HD's or something? If not, is there a way to easily and safely link (display and input devices) <--> HD #1 <--> HD#2 and move files around between the two? Would partitioning have any place in this discussion? Current HD is a Compaq Presario 9642 from about 1995-96 that runs Win95. "New" HD is something a friend put together at some point in the past that is housed in an open-air frame with a "MicroQ" label on the front. If it matters whether it's running Win95 or Win98, just give me a broad idea of what I could do and I'll hopefully find out which shortly. I have an exam to study for tomorrow, so I'll probably log off in a few minutes and leave you to this. Thanks in advance.
o_O I remember several years ago that my parents had a second hard drive on our Zeos running Windows 95. Is that what you mean by dynamic drive, two hard drives operating on the same computer? I'm actually interested in doing this too. I have a relatively good computer, but it has a very small hard drive and it's nearly full. We have a couple old computers with 10-20gb HDDs on them.
depending on the motherboard, you should just be able to add in the new HD and slave it to the primary one in the BIOS. not sure how win95 will deal with that though, pretty sure my old p75 had 2 HDs in it at some point though.
Oh, I thought he was referring to having two separate disk drives act as one, that's what a dynamic drive is.
Nah, just plug in the thing to the remaining part of the flat cable connected to the first drive, plug in another power cable and set the plastic thingy covering a couple of pins on the back of the drive into 'slave' position - usually the top of the drive has a pic of what that position is. Then just startup and the drive will reveal itself. You can then format it to make it ready for use (of course after first checking for ancient goodies. But if the first drive has bad sectors, you might consider installing windows on the 'new' drive instead, depending on it's condition. By the way, which games make it worth going through all this shit?
Hopefully it's not a proprietary drive which doesn't have jumpers for slave/master/single on the back of it - hopefully neither one is that way. Some PC manufacturers modified the HDs they'd get to make them proprietary, back in the day.
I'll take whichever and whatever I can get. But I take it that your "dynamic drive" thing isn't feasible here. I didn't think it'd be possible to have two installations of Windows trying to co-exist on the same system, but I was willing to keep my options open. Okay, thanks, I'll look at the backs when I get home and see if everything seems to make sense. Basically that's our "games" computer, so all our old games (especially since many of them need Shutdown-MSDOS). Lately that's just been Magic Carpet, Descent, hockey, and a few others, plus my brother brings one home every once in a while
if its just for games, invest in - or 'acquire' - a copy of VMWare for your main PC. you can run any number of windows installs on it. this must be the fifth thread in a month i've mentioned VMWare, perhaps i'll email them for an advertising job
A long-overdue update, for the curious: It's a monster. Same version of Win '95 as the first HD, aside from an additional B at the end, but there are about 6 2/3 GB on this one! About 2 1/2 of those gigs are already in use, but it looks like a fair bit of that is taken up by Internet junk. And HD B runs 32 MB RAM, twice as much as our old. Has around ten "new" fonts that look good and usable . Problem with all this is the "cupholder" won't slide in all the way, and the floppy drive just plain doesn't work aside from ejecting nicely* . It does have an "Iomega Parallel Port Zip Interface", but that is apparently non-functioning and we don't have any ZIP Drives even if it turns out to be the right kind of "Zip" interface. There is also an "Intel [...] PCI to USB Universal Host Controller" listed. * From the Device Manager: "See hardware documentation. (Code 10.)"
