On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 22:28, Jon Brase <jon.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 3/3/21 7:30 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > > Yes. Use a disk manager. It will install a tiny overlay before the OS > > boots and that will allow you to use arbitrarily-large disks without > > problems. (Probably not with Linux, but with DOS, Win9x, OS/2 and > > maybe even NT). > > Actually, it looks like, through kernel 2.5.<mumble>, Linux explicitly > detected and worked with both OnTrack and EasyDrive. Since that version, > it has a tunable offset parameter that can be set appropriately for > either one by the user (63 sectors for OnTrack, 1 for EasyDrive). All > other avenues seem to have failed, so I may well be going that route next.
That is actually quite impressive! I did not know that. Thanks for the info. Once installed, it's a good, simple, easy solution. I used to use them a lot back in the day (late 1990s, roughly.) Installing a CPU upgrade in an old PC was rarely worth the hassle, but if you replaced a small hard disk (especially if compressed with DoubleSpace or something) with a big more modern one, and maxed out the RAM, the performance improvement was often very gratifying for a relatively small spend. In one friend's machine, I did this _and_ an IDT WinChip CPU upgrade. The old boot HDD I retained but made drive D: and put the Windows swapfile on it. This was a small faff as it was a low-profile Dell and there wasn't a suitable 2nd HDD bay. I improvised with cable ties and duct tape. Later on he bought a new box and gave it to his dad. His dad had a friend around to install a new program on it or something trivial and got curious about the drive arrangement. A message was relayed from friend to father to son to me: "whoever upgraded your son's old PC for him _really_ knew what he was doing! I've never seen an old 486 perform so well, so I opened it up. Tell your son's mate that he did the neatest, tidiest and most comprehensive upgrade I've ever seen!" So, that was nice. :-) -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
