I picked up a bunch of ESDI hard drives at the System Source Swap Meet. These were on the free pile! I figured at least one of them should work in my IBM PS/2 Model 70 386... well, perhaps. Let's find out! 🧵 time!
First, we have to start with the base case. Will the system start up with my 60MB ESDI drive in it? Yes. Good! Carry on!!
First drive in, but system is detecting a configuration change. That can't be good. Have a listen to the drive. Yeah, I think this one is a goner. I ran system configuration, and yea, not even detected. Oh well!
I put the next drive in, and it got detected. After configuring it, the drive started to boot OS/2! Amazing. It did seem to struggle a little.. so I tried formatting it. This drive has one bad block, that's it!! And... after formatting, its boots DOS. Score!!
The next drive wasn't as happy. On booting the system, we can hear it try and reset itself over and over. Eventually it fails with a 10483 error. Gemini tells me this is ESDI Fixed Disk Failure. I'll buy that.
The next drive was so bad that it even prevented the system from going through the bootup process. I even got out my POST code reader. This must be putting out super bad signals on the bus. Next!
The next drive was... odd. First, it claimed to need a special ADF file for detection. And then it just gave 10483 as well. So I gave it some "percussive maintenance", and next thing you know, I was able format it and boot from it. But it didn't last sadly. Oh well.
In the end though, we ended up with a fairly decent 120 MB drive. This is bigger than the 60 MB drive I have in the system (granted, I also do have an McIDE-CF, so it doesn't particularly matter). I swapped it in and installed BootIt Bare Metal on it!
And since we do have that McIDE-CF, which contains a partition with BootIt's settings, I had to recall how to make BootIt use that partition. But after doing that, I saw a very familiar list of operating systems appear on next boot!
Well, anyway, this was fun. I'm going to keep the 60 MB drive in case the 120 MB drive fails in the end. It's nice to have spare parts for this PS/2 since it is... well.. proprietary. Thanks for reading!
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