my compaq 486 boots up with a "disk controller error" no matter what hard drive I have connected. i've tried a ~40GB IDE drive, two different IDE-CF adapters with 2 different industrial CF cards, and an IDE-SD adapter, and 3 different IDE cables. i can't set the drive geometry for any of these in the BIOS, because while i was able to run `whatide` and `idediag` off a floppy, neither detected any drives at all. so. do you reckon the disk controller genuinely is fucked, or is there something else?
@jk in my experience early compaqs are notoriously bad at working with arbitrary hard drives, i have one that'll only work with a 16gb cf to ide adapter because it refuses to acknowledge anything bigger than that
plus there's the issue of some of them (at least their laptop lines) not having setup in bios so rather you need to boot off a setup floppy to change anything in the bios and the images are hard to find.. etc
@mavica_again i was thinking of maxing out the ram from 4 MB to 20 MB and putting one of those pentium-class (like ~100 MHz) later processors in it, but based on what i've seen on ebay, they're pretty pricy, especially for a computer i literally found in the trash
@jk yeah the retro parts market online is kinda wild right now asking silly prices
given the Compaq laptop i have that won't see anything larger than 16gb is a 1998 Pentium 2 yeah i think yours might be expecting even smaller drives
@mavica_again thankfully this isn't a laptop, it's a 433 all-in-one, which i really like because of the convenience of having a decent CRT and a 486 machine in the same unit. maybe i'll try buying a tiny CF card? the smallest I tried was a 32 GB.
when i first got the thing ten years ago i was kind of tempted to gut the thing and try to just put a raspberry pi or something inside the case, connected to the built-in monitor, but i've really soured on that idea nowadays. the 486 must live