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Hard drive for ancient 8088 pc

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dada

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Joined
Oct 19, 2015
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5
Hi everybody. I've got an old IBM PC clone here with two floppy drives and no hard drive. (Anybody from the Netherlands will instantly recognize that logo.)

This is actually exactly the same model that I used as a kid, except that one also had a hard drive. I'm therefore looking for a way to get a new hard drive for it. I think these models originally contained Miniscribe drives but they are ridiculously expensive online and probably very unreliable.

Someone on another forum mentioned to me that I might want to get an XT-IDE variant, which would allow me to connect Flash storage through IDE, which sounds to me like a perfect solution. I was able to find some information here but they seem to be out of stock. Would anyone here happen to know something similar that I could check out? Thanks!
 
If you type in XT-IDE in eBay search, there are options to buy the bare board, a kit, or fully assembled. I have one in my XT turbo machine with a 1 gb disk on module attached. More storage than you are eer likely to need on that machine. It will accept larger DOMs if you want.
 
Several of the XT-IDE options on eBay are my rev 3 boards -- I'm the one selling blue boards, the parts kit, and the blue assembled XT-IDEs. You're of course free to buy off eBay, but it's cheaper if you PM me and buy direct (eBay fees are around 11% of the eBay prices).

I'd avoid the white/green "OPTIMA" boards, they're based off of my rev 3 board, which is of course fine -- it's open source, but the guy making them doesn't seem to really know what he's doing. For example, he decided he didn't need any of the bypass capacitors.

This is the project page for the XT-IDE rev 3:

http://www.glitchwrks.com/2016/07/06/xt-ide-rev3

I can also provide industrial Flash modules which will work directly with the XT-IDE rev 3 -- no power cable required. I have 64 MB, 128 MB, and 8 GB modules. Personally, I like the 64 MB and 128 MB modules for XT use -- they're closer to the actual hard drives you might've had in such a system, and they don't take forever for the first DOS DIR!
 
Stone said:
Just off the top of your head... about how long would that take with the ~10 GB drive someone jokingly (I hope) suggested earlier? :)
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Last time I checked all DOS versions with support for INT 13h extensions and FAT32 required 386+
So, on an 8088 you can't have more than 8 GB divided into four 2 GB partitions.
 
Stone said:
Do you have 10 GB of PC/XT programs/material?

Do you know anyone that does?

Can you even name/list 10 GB of PC/XT material?
Click to expand...

Yes, yes, and yes. Disclaimer: I'm an archivist.

lyonadmiral said:
I'll buy that for a dollar...
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And you'd be overpaying! :)

Stone said:
Just off the top of your head... about how long would that take with the ~10 GB drive someone jokingly (I hope) suggested earlier? :)
Click to expand...

The time a DIR takes on a slow computer is proportional to the number of clusters in the filesystem, so a 2GB DIR takes the same time as a 1GB DIR, a 512MB DIR, a 256MB DIR, etc. as they all use the maximum 65517 clusters per filesystem. Takes about 17 seconds @ 4.77 MHz and ~50 seconds on a PCjr.

Xacalite said:
So, on an 8088 you can't have more than 8 GB divided into four 2 GB partitions.
Click to expand...

Correct. The only way to exceed this is to use the network redirector to point to a network drive, or to use something like EtherDFS which would let you put a 2G partition at drives C through Z for a total of 48 GB.
 
quote_icon.png
Originally Posted by Stone
Do you have 10 GB of PC/XT programs/material?

Trixter said:
Yes. Disclaimer: I'm an archivist.
Click to expand...
Now the relevant question...

Is all that material stored on a single PC or XT?
 
Stone said:
Is all that material stored on a single PC or XT?
Click to expand...

Actually, yes. And since I shouldn't be the only person in the world with this capability, I'm working on a system that allows anyone to easily load up vintage DOS systems with gigs of software/games. The current workflow is 1. Point a script to a source dir of archives and it copies them to dos-friendly filenames in a destination dir, 2. The user copies those dos-friendly files over to their vintage system, and 3. A launcher/menu with search capabilities is included with the copied files so that you can easily search and launch what you copied over.

I've had this working since February but want to add more features and make it foolproof before releasing it, which should happen in October.

This is off-topic, so to get things back on-topic: To the OP: Get an XT-IDE variant and use it with a 2G compact flash card, which should serve your needs very well. Format the compact flash in your vintage system as a single 2G primary partition, and you will be able to read/write the card in a modern system with a USB card reader. I've done this for over a decade and it's been very helpful when I want to move more than 10% of the drive around.
 
Wow, thanks for all your helpful replies! I have to confess, I don't visit this forum normally so I kind of forgot I had this topic here until now. :(

Think I'll send you a PM, @glitch. The hardcard option sounds interesting too, but I think maybe the XT-IDE is the most reliable solution long term.
 
Trixter said:
(...) or to use something like EtherDFS which would let you put a 2G partition at drives C through Z for a total of 48 GB.
Click to expand...

Thanks for mentioning EtherDFS :)

There is no need to "mount" multiple 2G partitions with EtherDFS, though. You can very well mount a single huge EtherDFS partition of, say, 1 TiB to the 8086, and things will "just work". The only downside is that a 'DIR' command on the EtherDFS drive will always show a maximum of 2G total and 2G of free disk space - but that's only a visual discrepancy, applications should not get confused by this (but humans could, and perhaps filesystem-specific applications too, but these should not be ran on a network drive anyway). I tried to explain that in the BUGS.TXT documentation, but now I see that I may have worded it very unclearly... Will try to improve on that.
 
Stone said:
Just off the top of your head... about how long would that take with the ~10 GB drive someone jokingly (I hope) suggested earlier? :)
Click to expand...

I have a 1 GB CF card in my IBM 5160 and it takes about 30 seconds for the first directory listing. If 10 GB takes 10x as long, that’s a whole 5 minutes!
 
Assuming etherdfs is using a network redirector interface, it should actually take less time to produce the first (and every) directory listing, not more time.
 
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