Where to find legacy computer parts

[Scott Shepherd]

We have a old computer, running Windows 95 that runs a piece of equipment. It has an internal card that drives the machine and it's all old stuff and upgrading all of that stuff is in the $6,000 range. The Hard Drive has given up the ghost and I need to figure out how to replace it.

The date on the hard drive is 2000, and it's an Enhanced IDE 20 MB Hard Drive that is in a Packard Bell computer.

Is there a place that sells legacy compatible products? My guess is a new 20GB drive wouldn't be supported by the motherboard, but that could be incorrect.

I searched the model number on google and came up with some used ones on eBay, but I'd like to replace it with something other than one that is marked "Used" with no idea if it's about to go next week or not.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I could be wrong but if it's the hard drive that's bad, any Enhanced IDE hard drive should work.

Phil Thien might be a good source of information.

[Bill Huber]

Scott, if you just need a hard drive, I have a 120 GB Western Digital you can have, it is an EIDE it has a May 2003 date on it.
If you want it send me a PM with and address and I will ship it to you.

The main thing is do you have all the software to reinstall on the new drive?

[Brett Luna]

If your motherboard has an available card slot, another option would be to by a hard drive controller that will run a more up-to-date hard drive. Something to keep in mind, though...Win95 and your motherboard's BIOS have limits on the drive capacity it can use. I don't remember what those limits are of course but if you can find the MB model number, you might be able to research it. On the other hand, it might be worth your time and effort to have a local shop do the research and work for you.

[Matt Meiser]

runs a piece of equipment
...
Packard Bell

That right there is scary. How much does downtime on this equipment cost you?

[Chuck Wintle]

We have a old computer, running Windows 95 that runs a piece of equipment. It has an internal card that drives the machine and it's all old stuff and upgrading all of that stuff is in the $6,000 range. The Hard Drive has given up the ghost and I need to figure out how to replace it.

The date on the hard drive is 2000, and it's an Enhanced IDE 20 MB Hard Drive that is in a Packard Bell computer.

Is there a place that sells legacy compatible products? My guess is a new 20GB drive wouldn't be supported by the motherboard, but that could be incorrect.

I searched the model number on google and came up with some used ones on eBay, but I'd like to replace it with something other than one that is marked "Used" with no idea if it's about to go next week or not.

i would take a chance on the drives on ebay..if the cost is low. otherwise you will need an add in card to manage the newer drives.

[Greg R Bradley]

New drives are readily available. I prefer Seagate Barracuda for drives of that type as the Western Digital 20-40Gb drives of that vintage had bearing issues. You may not be able to use a drive larger than 40Gb with the BIOS. Some drives slightly larger than 40Gb at the time had jumpers that would make them compatible with BIOS that did not support the larger drives. They just made a 60 or 80 Gb drive look like a 40Gb.

Probably easiest to just look on Amazon and get a Barracuda IDE drive of 20Gb. It should be around $30-35.

Edited to add: Here is a link: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barrac...barracuda+20gb

[Garth Almgren]

Any IDE drive should work (the IDE spec is for the most part backwards compatible), however the BIOS or the OS might only recognize a portion of the hard drive. Windows 95 OSR2 (FAT32) will only recognize partitions up to 32 gigs, whereas older versions of Win95 using FAT16 will only handle 2 gig partitions. However if the machine has been running happily on a 20 meg hard drive I don't think that limit will even be a problem.

You could also try a SATA to IDE adapter with a newer SATA hard drive, just keeping in mind that the same size limits will apply.

[Garth Almgren]

Agreed, that's probably going to be his best bet.

Might want to get a few, since those drives are likely to be NOS (New Old Stock) and probably manufactured more than 10 years ago. They'll either work great and run for years, or die within a couple days.

[Curt Harms]

These will all be 'refurbished' with 90 day warranty. I boght an 80 GB. for a 1999ish H-P. It's a dedicated torrent box so runs quite a bit. So far so good.

http://www.microcenter.com/search/se...a-Micro-Center

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks for the tips guys. I appreciate the offer Bill, that's very kind of you. We're trying to rethink what we do with it all right now. The problem is the machine's card that's installed in the computer is using an ISA 16 bit bus. So anything "new" doesn't have that ISA 16 bit bus. I have a graveyard of old computers here, and I've already opened them all up to see if one might have an ISA slot, but no luck. Next step is to see if any of them have an IDE drive in them. If so, I'll just swap out the drives. If not, we'll rethink it. I see there's a company or two out there offering new, modern computers with ISA buses, capable of running W98 and XP, so it might be that we pick one of those up. It might help because right now, we have no way of communicating with this computer because it was "pre-USB" and "pre-Ethernet", so there's no way to even share a file with it, since it's using floppy drives and none of our modern computers have them, and if they did, the files are larger than a floppy can handle.

The machine doesn't run much, only a couple times a year for small jobs, so it's easy to either sub the work out that would run on it or just pass on the work.

Thanks for the help, it's giving me things to look at and think about. If you have more suggestions, keep them coming!

[Dave Cullen]

Thanks for the tips guys. I appreciate the offer Bill, that's very kind of you. We're trying to rethink what we do with it all right now. The problem is the machine's card that's installed in the computer is using an ISA 16 bit bus. So anything "new" doesn't have that ISA 16 bit bus. I have a graveyard of old computers here, and I've already opened them all up to see if one might have an ISA slot, but no luck. Next step is to see if any of them have an IDE drive in them. If so, I'll just swap out the drives. If not, we'll rethink it. I see there's a company or two out there offering new, modern computers with ISA buses, capable of running W98 and XP, so it might be that we pick one of those up. It might help because right now, we have no way of communicating with this computer because it was "pre-USB" and "pre-Ethernet", so there's no way to even share a file with it, since it's using floppy drives and none of our modern computers have them, and if they did, the files are larger than a floppy can handle.

The machine doesn't run much, only a couple times a year for small jobs, so it's easy to either sub the work out that would run on it or just pass on the work.

Thanks for the help, it's giving me things to look at and think about. If you have more suggestions, keep them coming!

Scott -

I'm an EE and Software Engineer, and I have supported legacy systems in a manufacturing facility for the last 18 years. BTDT is an understatement.

My company had a proprietary ISA slot board that ran one of our processes and as the ISA bus became obsolete it became increasingly difficult to source PC's that supported it. The last iteration of machines that I bought were from a company called BSi (Broadax Systems Inc) 17539 E Rowland Street City of Industry, CA. They quoted me an industrial quality machine with an ISA slot, plus PCI slots and a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM for about $1K, with WinXP as the operating system.

Be aware that Win98 was the last Microsoft OS that supported direct communications with the hardware. It's a significant upgrade from Win95 but still short of the Win2000 iterations (WinXp etc) but those would require a rewrite of your software and a Windows driver to access the hardware.

You can get IDE or SATA drives of any size you want, but as others have mentioned the largest partition will be dependant on the OS.

[Bryan Rocker]

I find it hard to even contemplate a new pc to replace an ancient PB @ $6K. You should be spending no more than $1500 MAX and thats for a very strong gaming grade computer. Sam's has a 12 gig mem I7 Dell ready to use for $900. What is it you need that will cost so much?

Bryan

PS I had a PB486 back in the day, I still have a P100 that still runs....I built most of mine.....IF you want I can see what ISA HD's I have........

[Phil Thien]

Some of the newer boards with shoehorned ISA buses won't work with older cards/apps. I've had a couple where some IRQ's were reserved for onboard features and couldn't be used over the ISA bus, and I needed those IRQ's for my cards to work. If you spend a lot of money on a board/system, get assurances you can return it if the thing doesn't work for you.

You can't always just shove a 20GB drive into a machine that came with a 20MB drive. A machine that came with a 20MB drive likely supported up to 2GB drives via 22-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing). Around 94/95, manufacturers started shipping machines with 28-bit LBA, which would support up to 128-GB. It is unlikely a machine that shipped with a 20MB drive would support 28-bit LBA. In fact, there is a chance your old Packard Bell used a more archaic drive type system where the BIOS recorded in the CMOSthe C/H/S (Cylinders/Heads/Sectors) via a drive type #. Ugh.

It would be nice if the BIOS would just use whatever it could of the larger drive. But things aren't that simple, because the larger # of blocks can overflow the 22-bits and result in some pretty bizarre capacities being reported. Sometimes the BIOS just goes off the rails.

My advice would be to find a 20MB hard drive. Or watch Craigslist for a used older machine with ISA bus.

[Dave Sheldrake]

I have a box of old new drives Scotty, I'll have a dig through and see what's in there, I'm sure one of them is a 128 meg drive (eide) if that's any good to you ,you are more than welcome to them...(from memory some of them are the bigger thinner 5 ish inch drives)

cheers

Dave