Rather than buy a secondhand IDE drive which could give up the ghost at any moment, one could buy a PATA2SATA3 Bi-Directional SATA IDE Adapter Converter (Bi-directional adapter converts IDE to SATA or SATA to IDE) from Startech (a reliable brand).
Or something similar ... there may be space constraints inside the case. And then buy a new SATA drive.
Okay, so the smallest SATA HDD you can buy new (we're talking about from reliable websites) looks like 500 GB.
So you have a 500 GB drive. How can you use that with a machine whose limit (probably fixed absolutely by the capabilities of the BIOS which no amount of clever partitioning can solve) is 8 GB (there are 2 insurmountable size barriers at around the 8 GB mark)?
Answer, you use the ATA command Set Max LBA. Something like Set Max LBA = 16777216.
That's 16777216 blocks * 512 bytes per block = 8589934592 /1024 = 8388608 kilobytes /1024 = 8192 megabyes /1024 = 8 gigabytes.
Given that the Phoenix BIOS cannot be earlier than 1994 there should be no problem with LBA and the appropriate ATA command set.
https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/suppor...tion-182971en/
You will need the drive manufacturer's utility program (or other disk utility) to do this. And you will have sacrificed a lot of space on the
new drive. This can be done successfully with either a large PATA drive (if you find one ... then no adapter is necessary) or SATA, but it is all rather arcane and mind-numbing.
As I wrote above, I was very wary of Cable Select as there seemed to be conflicting standards. Hard jumpered Master HDD at the
end of the cable and Slave HDD at the middle always seemed safest (if less convenient when swapping drives around) to me. You can replace the 40 conductor IDE ribbon cable with an 80 conductor cable for greater reliability.
A woman came to see Nasrudin.
W: I want my son to stop eating sugar, he's addicted.
N: Come back in 2 weeks.
2 weeks later.
N: Tell him to stop or he will be punished.
W: Why did you wait 2 weeks.
N: I wanted to see if it was possible first.