Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Microsoft Broke IDE LS-120 Support

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek0
IDE LS-120 support broken

Microsoft broke IDE LS-120 support. Agile is not Software Engineering and the rate of turds being pushed out the ass end of Sprints is proof of that. I set this machine up last year, in the summer sometime.

SilverStone PS13 ATX tower chasis

I was happy with the various Linux flavors I had on it. Then I encountered a need to put Windows 11 on it for some specific work. That’s like knowing you are going to install a virus. Surprisingly, the add-in IDE card fully supported my LS-120.

Don’t give me any shit about the age of the drives and them only holding 120MB. I’ve written about them before on this blog and in other places. For those who don’t know, besides writing software and helping out on the family farm, I also write an award winning technical book series. I even write novels. I’m currently writing the sequel to this novel as the characters choose to speak to me.

For an author, and LS-120 is perfect. It’s more than big enough to hold multiple backup versions of all the books you have “in progress” and the media fits in your shirt pocket to take home for off-site storage. Has a label you can actually write on, and there are plenty of cool storage things still around.

The Breakage

Imagine my shock a few days ago when I got done fleshing out a major portion of the Twenty of Two sequel only to be greeted by this.

IDE LS-120 support broken

That’s just *^(*&^(*ing lovely. Yeah, I tried a different disk.

LMDE7

Thankfully I’m a geek who keeps a lot of extra hardware around. This machine even had an extra 4TB spinning disk already installed. I already had LMDE7 on a thumb drive for some Open-Source work I’m doing, so, a dual-booting we will go!

Yes it finds the media and drive

Once LMDE7 was installed I stuck the exact same disk in and ba-da-bing ba-da-boom books appeared.

Reads it just fine.

It even knows the drive is LS-120

Can identify the type, manufacturer, firmware version, et-al.

Knows the brand and model of the IDE controller. Before Microsoft broke IDE LS-120 support, Windows 11 used to as well.

Summary

Microsoft broke IDE LS-120 support. Most likely they royally pooched the Marvell driver because Agile is not Software Engineering. TDD is not testing. Testing requires actual hardware with an actual QA team. Everything else is a lie.

Anyone running Windows 11 who suddenly has IDE stuff not working, you probably have a card using the Marvell chipset. Microsoft pooched it well.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.

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