Booting a Pi from Old Hard Drives

this is an old Raspberry Pi and these are some really old IDE hard drives wouldn't it be hilarious if we could get this tiny Marvel of modern engineering to boot natively off of these decades old time bombs of magnetic data Decay well I'm here to answer the questions that nobody asked and nobody needs the answer to so stay [Music] tuned and if you enjoy mashing up new and old technology into computational Abominations I hope we consider subscribing to the channel okay so I didn't just have this idea randomly in a vacuum because then I'd be dead this is an experiment in service of a top secret and kind of really weird computer build that I've been working on in the background now I don't want to give too much away but it involves booting an old Raspberry Pi off of an old spinning hard drive and not just any SP hard drive we need to find the perfect one with just the right clicky clacky '90s aesthetic and I know this is possible modern raspberry pies can boot from USB no problem so really we just need to find a way to get IDE to USB and then get sufficient power to the hulking spinning discs of rust and magnets preferably in the most Overkill ridiculous way possible sounds great in theory but these drives are really quite old so what's this going to be like in practice all right so the first step is getting this pie booting from usba and it's actually fairly simple to do but I don't want to just hook this thing up to HDMI since we're doing a bunch of weird anachronistic crap here so I have a better idea y oh yeah Ras looks awesome on this Trinitron but then again pretty much anything looks awesome on a Trinitron so I'm going to plug in our US stick here and then I'm going to use the SD Card Copier oh look I had a bunch of 2404 on there not for long yeah we're going to copy from the SD card to the used disc 3.0 now if this was a Raspberry Pi four or five we could just flash a special image to an SD card turn it on with that card inserted and it would change the boot order letting us boot from USB first but on this Raspberry Pi 3 we actually have to just edit a config file so PSE sudo VI boot firmware config.txt and then at the end of the file just need to add program USB boot mode equals one save that and now when we restart we should be able to boot from USB all right removing the SD card oh yes success okay now let me show you some of the hilarious drawing we're going to be experimenting with I've got a bunch of kind of regular size drives out of various macintoshes and other old computers but I also have a laptop IDE hard drive an enormous Quantum Bigfoot hard drive which if this works I'm kind of leaning towards this thing and on the opposite end of the spectrum we have this this is actually a spinning hard drive it's a Seagate Micro Drive 4 GB hard drive in a CF card package that was given to me at VCF Midwest by my friend Sloopy Malibu in order to get this IDE connector into USB with enough power what I'm hoping I can do is use one of these IDE to SATA adapters and then use a SAA to USB B adapter like so and then for power well we're going to use a whole freaking power supply here we might as well just power the Raspberry Pi itself off of this so I've got this Molex to USB power to give us a USB port into which I will plug a micro USB cable like so now to actually switch on the whole thing well we have to short out two pins on this but to make that easy I got one of these little guys which is just a toggle switch connected to those two pins and then another wire to light it up and voila this is now a computer when I plug this in and then hit this switch it will turn on both the hard drive and the rest berry pie right after this quick word about today's sponsor my Heritage I'm legitimately excited about this because I've wanted to do a DNA family history test for a long time the kit was super easy to use just a cheek swab and send it back it literally takes 2 minutes all right my my Heritage results are back I am 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SD card imager as soon as I flip this switch it should power on both the pie and the hard drive or it will explode oh there goes the hard drive spinning up and the pie is booting ah bad ideas they're the best oh yeah it worked it mounted the hard drive oh yeah it's not stupid if it works even if it's stupid low voltage warning yeah it's probably fine the hard drive is making delightful hard drive noises and I have successfully flashed 32-bit raspian onto the hard drive removing the SD card and on okay well not looking so good the hard drive spins up for a second and then spins back down no green light on the pie all right let's try a different adapter here this is actually straight from ID to USB no chain of dongles needed this is probably a much smarter idea let's try to boot from it oh my God it's booting look green light on the [Music] pie and successfully booted into raspian 32bit let's try to launch the web browser and see if it's painfully slow or we can barely tell the difference over an SD card now this is feeling quite slow there is quite a lot of hard drive access happening let's try patreon.com action retro yeah this feels quite slow loading from hard drive and it is really hitting that hard drive he look it's my cats okay this ridiculous Beast is the one I'm most excited about it is a 9 gigabyte Quantum Bigfoot out of a late 90s compact it even says replace with compact spare part number here look how much bigger it is than the 3 and 1/2 in standard size drive and I'm hoping it is even louder look at this Beast oh it's making some nice noises all right booting from the Quantum Bigfoot all right not only did this hard drive create a comically loud Symphony of wonderful hard drive noises it also took way longer to boot up and get to the desktop which in our sick game here is actually a point in its favor let's see what brow housing the internet feels like good gravy did that take forever to even just open the web browser for the first time and I guess it makes sense this hard drive is only 4,000 RPM let's open our favorite frog find.com well this website at least is much friendlier towards vintage computers yeah I'm really liking the uh horribleness of this drive but let's go from a comically big hard drive to a comically small one now to connect this tiny CF card sized hard drive we're going to have to use a couple adapters we'll start with this CF to 2.5 in ide this dongle which of course will plug into this dongle yeah there we go not convoluted at all all right powering on it's making noises oh yeah check it out it works now since we only have 4 gigabyt to work with we're going to have to use a different operating system because even the 32-bit version of raspian requires I think six or nine I think six let's pop risos Pi on there and I don't think this even needs a fraction of that 4 gigabytes the download is .1 gigabytes this tiny hard drive is dead silent all right booting risos from a 2004 Seagate Micro Drive tiny mechanical hard disk here goes nothing all right well apparently it does not like booting from the micro drive or probably more accurately it does not like this huge honken combination of adapters well even connecting this directly to a USB CF card reader doesn't allow it to boot I guess this CF IDE hard drive just isn't bootable on here all right might as well test this laptop hard drive and this hard drive is also only 4 GB so we will try risk OS again all right well it doesn't want to boot off of this hard drive either so I guess it doesn't like this particular adapter I'm using but that's okay because you know what these two hard drives are pretty quiet which you know in any other universe is a benefit but in our sick twisted experiment here well that's a point against them and uh disqualified okay well off camera I went through a bunch of other IDE hard drives and I only found three that don't work and I have to say I think the winner is this now winner of what you might ask and uh that's a good question I'm not going to answer it right now but if you want to have an authentic 1990s hard drive experience on your Raspberry Pi for some unknown reason I can definitely recommend a Quantum Bigfoot although most of these probably aren't working these days in any event if you want to find out just what in the heck I was doing all of this for well you're just going to have to stick around so make sure you're subscribed to the channel in any event if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and thank you very much for watching and thank you again to my Heritage for sponsoring today's video and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Andrew Nicholson April white Chris bigs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson control Al Reese Drew Hamlin froto Jedi Gaspar heler George rosansky Graham Greg from rut K mods James Fryman James Lorry Jason Papas Jason eel Camille rowski Lyall truid Matthew cowall Nick Daniels Paul Spencer Ryan Scott Cedar bone Scott Thompson Tom Woodfin Unknown Soldier 41 Veronica explains and zantron industrial who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 52,651

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: i9ENd7zf8Tg

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024