Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

I have honestly never, ever, seen a non-sealed hard-drive, complete with an air-filter. And now, it turns out, I'll never see a fully-assembled on, either. Pity - it doesn't say anywhere on the hard drive what it's capacity is. I guess no more than about 10Mb - but, like I said, now we'll never know!

The first PC-XT I laid hands on (ca. 1983) had a single 10MB hard drive. I never took one apart, so have little understanding of its internals.

I believe my brother-in-law still has my 1987 PC-XT (8088) clone, with a 40MB drive. Ca 2001, when I gave him a nicer box, the old one was still working fine, Hercules graphics card (I loved that card!) and all. It could even run its ancient (mid 1990s) DOS copy of Mosaic (or maybe Netscape – I can’t remember), via a 9600 bps modem, to surf the web.

I’d send you its old drive and controller, but the postage is likely to be absurd. Still, it goes to show that if you poked through enough closets, you’d likely find not only a working XT drive, but a whole working machine.

Also, even with its hard drive in piece beside it, your living fossil should boot to a 5.25” DOS boot floppy disk OK, even if, as freeztar suggest, it has a dead CMOS battery. As I recall, some of those old CMOSs had weird batteries, but could all be replaced by any 3V DC source, that is, a couple of AA[A] batteries in a homemade or manufactured holder.