Hard drive swap on a Windows 98 machine? Not worth the trouble.

I was in my garage last Saturday trying to bring an old Compaq Deskpro back to life. Everyone online says to just swap in a modern SSD with an adapter and go. So I did exactly that. 20GB SATA SSD through a converter, cloned the old 4GB IDE drive, and fired it up. The system recognized it for about 5 minutes then locked up hard. After three more tries with different jumper settings and partitions, I gave up and put the original drive back in. The problem is old BIOS chips just can't handle the new storage geometry right. Has anyone else found a specific model of CF card that works better for this? I'm thinking of going that route instead.

2 comments

2 Comments

faithjones7d ago

Did you try sacrificing a jumper cable to the PC gods? lol

the_val7d ago

Ha! Honestly a few years ago I would have rolled my eyes at that. But after my third build in a row had some mystery issue I swore I did everything right on? Yeah I started leaving a single sacrificial cable near the case just in case. It sounds dumb but it made me feel better and somehow the next boot just worked. Maybe it's superstition, maybe it's some weird static discharge thing, I don't know. You ever try something silly like that and it actually worked?