Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Fephisto III wrote:
> I had attempted hooking up the old computer's hard drive as a slave to another
> computer so as to download the hard drive version of Basic Linux, but the
> plug-ins weren't correct.  I then tried using a different hard disk and 
> hooking
> it up as a slave in the old computer, but even that Windows 95 hard disk was
> obviosuly too new for the really crappy BIOS.

Can you take the drive out of the 486 and put it into another computer as 
the only drive on the secondary controller?  Then you copy files from C: 
to D: (assuming only one partition per drive).

486 BIOS can often only handle drives up to 500 (540?) MB.

By 'plug-in's you probably mean whether the drive was set as master or 
slave.  What you have in there now is probably set to 'master' or possibly 
to 'single'.  Sometimes they are the same.  You move jumpers, and if you 
are lucky the drive will have instructions on it (or look them up for that 
model, online).  Probably the Win98drive was also set to master or single 
and needs to be set to slave to work in a 486, which has only one IDE 
controller.  In a pentium there are two controllers so you can leave the 
two drives set the way you found them (as single).  MA - master SL - slave 
SG - single.  Western Digital Caviar has MA SL and CS (cable select, a 
different method), but single is not labelled - it is NO jumpers. In a 
pentium there are probably two IDE cables, one plugged into each 
controller on the board, usually with two plugs on each cable.  If you 
want to fiddle with hard drive settings, you can set the second drive to 
slave and the first to master and plug into the same (primary) controller, 
otherwise you would probably need to unplug a CD-ROM drive temporarily 
from the secondary controller to plug in the second hard drive as single.

Sindi