On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Brian Phillips <[email protected]>wrote:
> Not really Unix specific, but since this mailing list has a very large > number of tinkerers, I thought I could get some input. > > I work in the cleanroom here at the Y and we recently had a tool bite the > dust. A small computer runs all the hardware (vacuum pumps, interlocks, > etc) and it had a hard drive crash/data issue. > > The hardware is late 90's, so it's finicky, to say the least. A Pentium > 166 > MHz processor with a BIOS that can't boot hard drives larger than 4 GB. > The > system runs Windows NT 4 and a proprietary software that dropped support 7 > years ago. To re-tool the machine to the current decade of hardware, it > would be in the thousands of dollars. > > It's been a slight chore finding *reliable* replacement hard disks that > would work in this machine. They're all EXPENSIVE refurbs or used/shady > hardware on eBay. > > I was wondering what the feasibility of a CF card in a CF IDE adapter would > be. From my reading, CF cards have IDE chips in them, and present > themselves as a hard drive. At face value, the late 90's computer > shouldn't > have any clue that it's not a spinning magnetic hard drive. > > I can handle the caveat of disabling the page file. Other than that, > there's not really any hard disk activity that would cause it to wear the > CF > card down. Very little logging (and even then, that's aggregating, not > write/erasing). > > Any stories that people want to share? > > Does the computer have an ISA or PCI slot? You might be able to turn up a SCSI controller which might give you more options. I thought you could use a larger drive on these old computers, it just wouldn't be able to use anything past 4GB. Robert
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