Ebay: Searching For Old Hard Drive For Old System: Advice Needed!

Hi! I might have an old DOS based laptop at my mother's house--if she can find it. It has no hard drive, and I want to install one. I just looked for one on eBay but couldn't limit the results to anything below 32GB or something. I'm looking for a hard drive in the range 350-500MB. What should I do to narrow down the results? Or, where else can I look for one?

 

I think you are making this too hard on yourself.

First, you MUST determine the drive interface this laptop uses. If really old, it might be an IDE (aka, EIDE or PATA) drive. If so, you will need to fine one of those. But if it is a SATA drive, which have been around for 20 years, then you have a lot more choices.

There is no need to look for such small drives either. I would suspect, due to their rarity, they would be expensive. While many old computer will not support large drive, you typically can fool them by creating a small partition on a larger drive, then just use that partition.

 

Well...the laptop is old and has a 486DX4/75MHz microprocessor, so I would assume it has an IDE interface. The last time it was available, I was networking it to a previous Win98SE tower to simulate a hard drive. I can still use the old network files on my new Win98SE tower, as I believe I copied those files off of the old one onto a ZIP disk before I disassembled it. I used to enjoy the process but think it would be better to install a new hard drive, copy all the stuff off of its simulated hard drives then kill the network. I can keep its current parallel zip drive to install large programs.

 

If it involved spending money, I would not assume. I would look. Many laptop have access covers on back so you can see the drive. It will say on it what type it is. If no access cover, it is not a difficult task to remove the laptop's back case.

 

Digerati, you're right. Right now, I'm looking for prices. I currently can't install a new hard drive or even look at the back case, as the laptop's missing, and I don't know when or even if it would be found again. BTW, if I never find the laptop, I can use another DOS-based computer. I can post the desired specs here if you want. Where can I find one cheap?

 

It's not really about the computer being DOS based or not. It is about the hardware interface used by the motherboard.

eBay is all I can suggest.

 

Well...recently, I found a good DOS-based tower on eBay and had my mother's eBay account watch it. The hard drive is separate, so I should have to install everything myself. I am capable of doing that, and I have some DOS and Win3.1 install floppies--I had to replace one of the DOS floppies, though. The monitor is also separate. I told my mother about it yesterday. Let me see if I can get it.

 

I sure would be hesitant to pay anything for such REALLY OLD hardware. In fact, I just would not do it. If someone were to give it to me, then maybe I would take it just for fun, just to see if it still worked.

I am not sure what your objective is, but it sure seems like there is a safer, easier, and less expensive way to do it.

 

Well...other than experimenting with disk compression and nostalgia, I really don't know why I want a DOS computer. Maybe it's just for fun. I don't need one otherwise. Somebody here gave me a Win98SE tower, two Win7/32 laptops, some flash drives, a few USB floppy drives and a spare hard drive for free. Win98SE is good for most of my DOS experiments, and I can use DOSBox-X for them, also. Unfortunately, the Win98SE tower is having problems with DOS setup in Windows mode: I can't seem to get UMBs or EMS: if I use EMM386, I get an out of memory error while Windows is loading. If I use QEMM386 or another EMS manager--forgot its name--the system crashes immediately with an exception. I can still do my experiments with disk compression but not on its hard drive: I can still compress floppies and Zip disks, and the hard drive is huge. I can revert to DOS mode to get UMBs and EMS, as that seems to work, but I want to run most DOS software from Windows. BTW, I used to have a DOS laptop at my mother's house, but it's missing. If my mother can find it again, I can use it. It has many issues, including no hard drive and a broken monitor, but it works. I can get a replacement hard drive from eBay.

 

Well, have fun. But do everyone else a favor and don't connect those legacy, insecure systems to a network that has Internet access.

 

Well, I was thinking about networking my Wi98SE tower at my mother's house to my Win11/64 laptop via an ethernet cable after buying one. I was going to use a router to connect the PCs but can get a bridged cable and connect the two PCs. It will cost me the internet while the computers are connected, though. I'm not connecting the DOS computer except to the WIn98SE tower there, and the latter isn't connected to the internet. BTW, I was using NSLAN to network my old DOS laptop to my old Win98SE tower. Unfortunately, NSLAN only works in DOS mode, so I had to switch the tower to DOS mode with a special configuration. I was using a null modem serial cable to connect them. Is there a program to network DOS computers to Windows computers without sacrificing Windows mode?

 

I am not going to help you connect unsafe computers to the Internet where you become a potential threat to everyone else. Those legacy operating systems cannot be properly secured. My advice is to forget about trying. Have a good day.

 

When the Win11/64 and Win98 computers are networked to each other, they can be connected directly and the internet disconnected. When the DOS computer is networked to the Win98 computer, the Win98 computer won't be connected to the internet, as it should never be. Other than that, the network will be a LAN and not connected in any way to any computer outside the house. So, I'm not sharing internet access or making unsafe security risks.