A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here’s an update.

tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.

Longer story: I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn’t work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it’s on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.

Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.

After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a “user defined” hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.

After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.

I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn’t working for me (i still haven’t tried zmodem yet) but I couldn’t even receive an echo to the serial port. So I’ve been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.

Image of hard drive

Image of the computer running kings quest

Running testdisk

  • Davel23
    2•3 months ago

    If the drive is spinning when the USB is not plugged in then it’s clearly being powered by a separate power supply. Besides, 5.25" hard drives cannot be powered by USB, powered hub or not.

    • Nougat
      4•3 months ago

      … No. The computer has one power supply, and old computers from PB, Gateway, Dell, would have power supplies that produced barely enough wattage to run the hardware it sold with.

      You add another device, with its own power draw, and if you go over the limit of what the PSU is able to supply, something gets underpowered and misbehaves.

      Using a powered hub means that the power sent to the USB device is provided by the hub, and might make it so that OEM PSU is still sufficient. Here, though, we have already added an ISA>USB card.

      Another option is putting in a higher wattage PSU, but I don’t know what the connector used was on that machine. It might be hard to find something that would just plug right in.

      • Davel23
        5•3 months ago

        … No. USB hard drive adapters come with their own power supplies if they’re intended for 5.25" drives.

        • TipponEnglish
          7•3 months ago

          You’re being downvoted, but you’re right. Every adapter I’ve bought for a full sized hard drive has needed its own power supply. I’m not sure if I’ve seen one for a PATA drive that didn’t come with one.

        • @[email protected]
          3•3 months ago

          This is correct, these adapters all come with external power supplies to them run separate from the systems power.

      • Davel23
        3•3 months ago

        USB prior to version 3 and the type C connector only supplied 5 volts. 5.25" hard drives need 12 volts. No amount of powered hubs or higher wattage PSUs will change that.