Dear All,

Hope you all are in the best health. We have Mark-V system installed at our site here with DOS-based HMI. The issue we are facing the availability of 4 GB IDE Drives, since the system does not read any HDD greater than 4 GB. IDE Drive failure rate has also been increased so we are severely in need of a solution asap.

Solution 1 : Virtualization
One way to resolve this crisis is the virtualize our DOS-based HMI to window based. How ever we will need to find ARCNet Card with its drivers compatible with Windows and OKIdata Microline 490-24pin printer and I think we are good to go.

Solution 2 : Upgrade
Most unlikely to be approved

Solution 3 :
Any solution that the HMI motherboard can read IDE drives greater than 4 GB.

Virtualization is the most viable solution to me, need your precious inputs.

 

I'm not an expert in this area, but I found this link:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchang...limit-hdd-capacity-to-work-on-an-old-computer
It discusses a few options that may work for you, including a Linux command to make a larger drive look smaller and an IDE adapter for CF cards.

If you can find the hardware devices that will work on a Windows PC, you could also examine DOS Box, which is a virtual DOS environment. I haven't messed with it in a long time, and then only to tinker with very non-critical stuff, so I don't know if I would depend on it for this.

 

Rizwanhaider, this subject has been discussed many times before, I would suggest you use the search feature to look for related articles. Many of the difficulties are getting drivers for Arcnet cards with newer mother boards, disk drive sizes etc.
For your management group, I do not understand why they are not receptive to upgrading to a current platform. I have managed legacy devices and machines for various reasons through my career. But people don't seem to want to recognize the value of a generating asset and what it costs if that unit becomes unavailable. The MKV platform and the associated hardware has enjoyed a long successful career, but everything needs to be upgraded at some point to remain viable and reliable. Good luck with your project and I hope you are successful. Please write back and let us know how you proceed and how successful you are.

 

OK a little update here
We have managed to make a virtual machine in VMWare but somehow its not working. We have tried ACRONIS Image and Direct Disk to Virtual Disk cloning, but both version. Its gives divide error while booting up. Clock speed might be an issue but thats just our assumption. Any ideas?

 

I've had very limited success getting a VMWare image of a PC to work correctly. I got it to work one time (the original was Windows XP Pro) and that's it. All the other times, it blue screened on initial boot and I couldn't even get to safe mode.

I think your best bet is an upgrade. Second best is find a new hard drive that you can "downgrade" to fit, realizing that the old hardware that isn't compatible with modern PCs is also obsolete and increasingly likely to fail...and increasingly difficult to repair/replace. I really don't think virtualization is a good path here.

 

Hi all
I'm currently working as IT-specialist for a company that has a couple of Win 98 computers, using ArcNet and old spinning disks.
Regarding the harddisks, I was able to move them over to SATA SSD's using this converter :

https://www.startech.com/en-dk/hdd/ide2sat2

They have been pretty solid for a long time now using 120Gb Kingston SSD's (using 20GB partitions)

The problem with those though, can be to get SSD's that are small enough for the BIOS to see them - I had one system where this wasn't possible, and in that case I used a CF-Card to IDE adapter, since small capacity CF-cards is easier to come by :

https://www.startech.com/en-dk/hdd/ide2cf

I used an older version of "Ghost" to image the drives (although I had to use the "-fni"-switch to get it running, so the command was : ghost.exe -fni)

Lastly, I've had success to get hold of a PCI-ARCnet card that also has modern drivers. from Contemporary Controls:

https://www.ccontrols.com/arccontrol/pci20.htm

I think I've been able to virtualize the Win98 box that was running with an ISA ArcNet-card, and move it over to a more modern platform via "PCI-Passthrough" so that the guest-OS can see the card, using the Proxmox virtualization OS (Linux based)

As of now, the guest OS (Win 98) sees the ARCnet-card and tries to communicate with the equipment (we can see the lights blinking at the backside if the card when using the software) and I'm curently waiting for a service-window in our production to test it and get final confirmation.

If it works, then the next step is to get hold of Contemporary Controls PCI-express ARCnet card and test with that, since this will let us upgrade the host-machine even further.

I will keep you posted