This isn't really a Linux question (the box runs DOS at the moment) but it is a hardware question.

My 486 (which is over a decade old and mostly useless but which I'm kind of attached to because I like stuff that keeps on trucking) seems to be dead. Initially, it was running and I took some action or another in a program and it jammed. Many tests and reboots and whatnot later, the pattern seems to be that any disk access causes it to freeze. However, I never get any error messages except once when I accidentally launched WfW3.11. It claimed the disk wasn't responding, possibly due to hard drive problems with 32-bit access, but that's nonsense as it never had any problems before and it happens with pure DOS apps. Running scandisk goes smoothly through the preliminaries and smoothly up to 11% when it made (1) a bad noise and froze and (2) on restarting, a worse noise and froze. All other apps freeze similarly but, if I leave it alone long enough, they eventually load. Or loaded. Scandisk freezes for a very long time and I've yet to sit around for very long after the noise to see if it would ever complete. In the course of rebooting, it would sometimes freeze during the boot process. Thinking the hard drive must be dying, I tried booting from various floppies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But this makes no sense. While the autoexec.bat does contain instructions to create a temporary directory on the hard drive which might cause a hang if the disk wasn't functional (though I doubt it), the system will freeze between loading the kernel and processing config.sys. This is all purely on floppy. So why does everything point to a hard drive failure, yet I get boot failures from a floppy? To add to the confusion, tomsrtbt booted okay but then claimed there was no valid filesystem when I tried to mount the hard drive to take a look at it. But the next DOS disk I got to boot happily listed the C: drive. That time.

Other than a Vic20, I've only had five computers and only had one of those die. This sucks. Anyway - *is* it a hard drive failure? (When the Canon's hard drive failed it was quite verbose about its death agony.) And is there anything I can do about it? This is a Tandy Sensation, so I doubt there's much in the way of replacements. Maybe if I kick it *just so*?

As I read your post, it sounds like hard drive failure (of the "slow and painful death" variety). The floppy may be a different issue altogether, but nonetheless culminates to the inevitable:

It's time to let go.

Finding replacement parts for your 486 will be difficult, and possibly costly because of age and rarity. Getting a new hard drive will be like putting racing tires on an '86 Yugo. If you plan to put any money into it at all, you should consider just buying a newer system -- not superfastfreakycool system, just newer. Check the local classifieds for a PII system or something.

Maybe so. Thanks for the reply. I suppose the hard drive and floppy could fail at the same time, as weird as it seems. But it'd be even weirder because I've *already* had a double drive failure when my P100's CD-ROM and floppy died within a day or two of each other. That one, I did eventually repair (which was definitely worth it as I did it to try Linux for the first time) and it's still chugging along. So it's not that I need another computer - I still have the Pentium, a Celeron, and an Athlon. It's just that it was neat to have around. (And the more non-Palladium boxes I have around, the better I feel.) But, no, I don't suppose I could reasonably repair it. I don't know what the limitations are on it but finding a hard drive that would work would probably be impossible. And wedging it into the funky Tandy case. And, if I'd also need to replace the floppy... well, I guess that's it then. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't misidentifying the problem or missing some (relatively) easy fix. Thanks.

Let's all have a moment of silence for our friend, the 486.

Thanks again. But this is completely bizarre - we may have written it off too soon. Just for the heck of it, I tried repartitioning, reformatting, and reinstalling DOS a few times and got it to more or less work a couple of times, though not right. So then I made two partitions and went and put BasicLinux back on it (had a hell of a time remembering how I did it before and it wasn't any easier for trying to type 'cp' in DOS) and, under Linux, it seems fine. I'm sure not going to put any valuable data on it and it's a pain that Basic is missing so many commands (and that it uses busybox because half the options of the commands it *does* have are missing) but it still might be useful for experimenting with scripting or something. I added awk and some other stuff to it.

Not having a hard drive wouldn't be a problem for Basic since it's supposed to run off a ramdisk and I made floppies for it, but I don't like ramdisk systems and the floppy was giving trouble, too. I was just curious about resurrecting the hard drive. But it read off the floppy (to install awk and mc and so on) fine, too.

I'm sure it'll give up the ghost completely sometime soon (real soon) but we'll see. 25 MHz of 486SX processing power with 8 megs of memory and a spacious 102 MB hard drive - can't let that go to waste!