[plug] Old Hard Drives (was)HP to ship ... with SUSE pre-installed.

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thursday 05 August 2004 15:54, skribe wrote:
> On Thu,  5 Aug 2004 15:38, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > skribe wrote:
> > > That might have been the case with IBM-PC clone drives but it
> > > certainly wasn't the case with those made for the Amiga, which IIRC
> > > at the time outsold the PC.
> >
> > Did the Amiga use SCSI disks like the Mac?

> It could but IIRC mine was IDE.

Or even ST506!

> > Alternately, it might be that it
> > only applied to retail disks and disks shipped to OEMs. I'm just
> > guessing here, of coures.

> My first Amiga HDD (20M) came as a 'sidecar' which was plugged into the
> Amiga - there was no internal hdd per se.  We then had to format it and
> install AmigaOS from floppy.  This was standard.  There was no option for
> a preinstall by the shop geek - they were even more clueless than they
> are now. If you turned the hdd off overnight you had to lock the it (via
> an icon on the desktop IIRC) and then unlock it when you restarted. You

"Park" is the correct term. The heads are retracted off the data
areas on the platters (maybe over a "landing zone") so that they
could not damage the surface.

Modern hard drives do the parking automagically, or they simply
crash into the surface with negigible effect... until you've done it
1000 times.... :-(

> also had to lock it and remove the hdd f you wanted to move the computer
> - which we did a lot to play games over a serial cable at one another's
> homes.  Ah, those were the days =).

One may even be able to find Linux drivers for old ISA cards that
handled ST506 drives.

40MB was a huge drive back then. Now 40GB is "small".

> I've still got it btw.  Haven't booted it in 10 years.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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