Packard Bell Legend 730
Packard Bell Legend 730
I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first.
If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM.
Oh that’s awesome. I love the tick tick tick read sound on those 5.25s. Yeah some flavor of linux will run on it I’d bet. If not, a 50Mb HDD would be plenty anyway :)
Edit: well someone did it, anyway! https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/the-latest-linux-on-a-floppy-in-a-486/
Yea this thing needs a new drive. Trying to run any programs on it gives me read errors. I need to figure out what linux it could run. I'm comfortable with linux, but not with this kind of hardware.
not that you shouldn't replace the drive anyway, but...
depending on the drive epoch (I am guessing its ide/ata not ST-506) you could try a factory format. with the right drive and phase of the moon, the on-drive controller may actually go off and do it for real instead of faking it. its usually worth a try an old drive just for funsies.
Just saw your edit! I'll look into that!
Some suggestions for solid state alternatives as old mechanical magnetic storage has such a high failure rate. But retro whatever way you want, of course!
You can get ide to compact flash or ide to sata adapters and get some reasonably modern solid state hard drive storage in there, if that interests you. I understand (haven't tried personally) that compatibility can be kind of a crapshoot though.
You can also get a gotek which has a floppy interface and can load floppy images from a USB thumbdrive. Which might be a more functional option than getting a USB floppy drive for a modern machine.
The gotek looks like a cool way to add usb storage support. I'm hesitant only because this thing boots from the 3.5" drive right now so I don't want to touch that, but if I fix the hard drive problems and it boots from there then I might do this.
I do want to get an SSD in here, a friend of mine has done it before on a similarly old windows 98 system.
This is the first time I've seen a machine with both a 5.25 floppy disk drive and a CD drive. It wasn't like that stock, was it?
I don't know. I haven't found any info on its original specs.
That's an aftermarket CD drive, definitely installed long after purchase.
There’s a single-bay version somewhere, which can be handy sometimes.
I remember those computers with the keys for them, If I recall correctly, it was to prevent powering on or off depending on the position. I'd be willing to bet this is using an IDE standard drive based on it's age. eBay would most likely have those. If you have any MS-DOS install disks in your collection, you may be able to format the HDD and get up and running by reinstalling it., unless it's doing the "click of death' or spinning up and then down up then down and so forth.
The turbo button was pretty fun for the time too. IF you were running at 16mhz, you could hit the button and it would boost it to 33mzh or something like that. Sort of for the extra kick you would probably need to compile programs or run a newer game at the time.
Interesting, I do have some floppy disks that claim to be ms-dos. I also have some windows 95 and 98 cds. The hard drive isn't making any click of death sounds as far as I can tell, but I haven't exercised it. I just know the stuff currently on it is corrupted since I get read errors trying to exec anything. I wrote a text file, was able to read it back, so reinstalling might work, but i think a whole new drive would be best.
I saw that the bios lets me change the cpu speed to fast/slow, does that have anything to do with the turbo you think?
The CPU speed setting in the BIOS would help certainly. I would always set mine to the higher speed when it gave me the option.
More or less, the Turbo button was useful for the older software which couldn't handle the ability to run faster or ran too fast. Depress the button to toggle the speed down or up. (Nice little read about these here) https://dfarq.homeip.net/why-did-old-pcs-have-a-turbo-button/
As for the HDD since you were able to write a file, it's probably fine. One item of note, HDD's are not considered permanent storage as you have natural degradation of the magnetic layers on the surface (a.k.a. bit-rot) which is what you are probably seeing with the corrupted files. Simply formatting the drive should be enough for it to refresh the drive's platter(s) and create a more viable readable and writable surface. HDD's will be more prone to failing via motor or controller board failure. You really have nothing to lose other than a little bit of time! Then, if it fails during Win95 or Win98 install, then yeah, replace the drive.
That brings me back. I’ve had that cd drive
NetBSD (i386) should run fine on that box.
I'm curious how well CDDA (you may need to compile it from source) runs on that.
Stilgar: Again?