a couple of years ago the hard drive crashed in my 1993 compaq 486 and i just haven't had any luck getting any kind of modern storage device to work with it. i've tried two different types of SD-to-IDE adaptors and a CF-to-IDE adaptor and none of them even show up. maybe the disk controller is fucked or something?? or maybe theres just something stupid and obvious that i've missed

managed to get it to work with an 80 GB maxtor drive which i thought had died because 1) it's a maxtor drive and 2) it was making varied, quite interesting, and fucked up clicking sounds and didn't seem to work with the USB-IDE interface at all. so i guess i can't copy anything to the drive so everything will have to go on via 1.44MB sneakernet

you know like. when you have a box of 90 floppies and since only about 3 of them can reliably store data you just have to pick one of them to be the data mule?? anyway its time to install windows 95 via twenty two floppies and enjoy its exemplary performance on the the 4 MB 486 sans math coprocessor