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okay now we need a hard drive

can't find the ~300mb drive i was thinking of, i dumped most every hard drive i had under 40gb at Free Geek Twin Cities when i moved

could be absurd and put a 120gb drive in it 🙃

but i found this one in my stash, a WD Caviar 1.6gb drive from April 1996 that refuses to work on my USB-IDE adaptor, however works perfectly on the PS/1, and pairs nicely with the 32mb RAM crammed in it

has a fresh install of Win98 which would theoretically even boot on this machine, but we run in to our first Annoying Vintage Problem, the BIOS predates LBA by a few years and can't see more than 528mb

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

the way around this in DOS is to install a Drive Overlay like EZ-Drive, which does a bunch of hackery to boot itself first and replaces the entire IDE portion of the BIOS with updated drivers

ta-da, we can boot DOS and use the entire hard drive! 🥳

#retrocomputing #retropc #MSDOS