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Old December 19th 17, 01:56 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_6_]
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Posts: 41
Default New HDD, has corrupted Data - AGAIN

Ammammata wrote:
Il giorno Sat 16 Dec 2017 08:26:40p, ** ha inviato su
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general il messaggio
. Vediamo cosa ha scritto:

This is an old IBM brand computer from about 2001


an almost seventeen-years-old computer is like a Ford Model T
you can't ask the hardware to be fully functional after so much time
it's your mistake to pretend to work safely with it

imho


I have a few 18 year old machines, still in mint condition.

No complaints. The installed OS still runs, just like it used to.

These machines use a lot of electricity though. One machine
I measured some time ago, it used 150W just sitting there
doing nothing. Like it was a V8 car with big fins on the back :-)
The machines back then, had hardly any power-saving features.
That's one reason they make poor choices if your
electricity is expensive.

*******

They won't boot off a DVD though, because when the machines
were invented, DVDs didn't exist, and nobody prepared
for the arrival of DVDs.

I even put a DVD drive in the machines to test this.
I was disappointed, but not surprised.

On earlier computers, some of the booting process
is done by "hard drive emulation". The BIOS converts
other device types to "look like" a hard drive. And
part of that methodology involves "fixed size disks".
So when the DVD came along, it was much larger than
anything the designers had anticipated. Amongst
other problems. I don't think the BIOS knows what
the DVD command set looks like either. It wasn't
an El Torito problem I was seeing, it was a physical
layer problem - the BIOS just didn't want to touch
the drive.

One other quirk someone else in the newsgroups tested
at the time, is they inserted a SATA PCI card into
the machine. And the BIOS just ignored it, and the
OS couldn't use it. So again, if you use hardware
cards the BIOS has never heard of, there will be
problems.

But these really aren't surprises. It's to be
expected things like this will happen.

I was booting something just yesterday, and in the
boot log on the screen it said "18493843248 GB disk".
Then the next line said "this is a really big disk".
No ****. So again, modern software is never prepared
for surprises, even if the software was written
in 2017. I don't know how the booting OS in that
case, had managed to query the disk drive, but
it got an absurdly large (wrong) size from it. No software
is really "prepared for infinity and beyond" :-)

The main problem with old computers, is there's no
decent web browser to use on them. That's why the
machines sit in the Junk Room.

Paul