creepingnet
Veteran Member
It all started when I decided to go forward with my attempts to "modernize" my 80486 based computer and install different O/S to different HDD.
First off, I have a stock of several not-so-old hard drives...
80GB WD800JB Western Digital
40GB Western Digital
20GB Western Digital
8.4 GB Seagate
7.2 GB Maxtor
3GB Fujistu
636MB Fujitsu
Crazy enough ALL drives are detected by the BIOS, all of them work (to some extent despite wrong parameters for the 3GB drive on up). So started the fun with the DDO, or Dynamic Drive Overlays. I'm super familiar with these from my old Creeping Net days, as I was using them left and right to throw 30-80GB HDD into low-end Pentium era boxes, but I'd never done this on an old 486 before!
DDO's are programs that fit on the drive's boot sector and act as a translator between the BIOS and the actual hard drive. Most of the time you are to set the drive up as a 520MB drive with 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, and 1024 cylinders (with 1024 for the landzone). However, being as my 486's motherboard has an AWARD BIOS with auto detection, most of my drives range from 800MB (80GB drive) to 2GB (8GB) in the BIOS under auto-detect, and therefore, to keep things simple (both as I prefer auto-detect, and b/c my CMOS Battery is dead and I'm too lazy to replace it), I just auto-detect the drive using the DEL key on startup to get into the BIOS and do it. I don't plan to swap too terribly often.
My primary drive for this machine for the longest time has been a 3GB fujitsu with Ontrack Disk Manager installed, split into 2 1.5GB Partitions, and having MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 installed. This setup is around 3 years old and has been strong and reliable.
My next drive I finished preparing early this morning, is the 7.2GB Maxtor, split in half, with Maxblast installed on it. It's got a fresh install of Windows 95 OSR2 OEM on it. Should be plenty of room for DOOM, Diablo, and some other mid-late 90's titles. I've got plenty of machine for it @100 MHz with 64MB of RAM and a whole load of DX4 optimization options in the BIOS. 95 loads in about 5-6 seconds! The only things left there is to get the RTL8019AS network card drivers installed (or swap it with the New in Box Linksys card I have). 95 should be pretty fun as the last time I ran it on this actual computer, I managed to get Youtube to work (don't ask me how, it's just as much a mystery to me). Sure I only had 2 frames a minute, but the audio worked perfectly - ah yes, blasting Sabbath streaming broadband while playing Final DOOM.
One of the drives is getting Windows 2000 Professional x32 SP4 installed on it, reason being that I have run that setup on a 486 before, and it was freaky quick for the usual things you'd use a netbook for. I want to use on of the huge WD drives, but it says it's DDO is not compatible with Win2K....so I'm not sure just yet. Having this would also make networking a breeze as I could connect to my Windows 7 x64 box without a hitch (as there is no "Send Unencrypted Passwords to 3rd Party SMB Servers" option in the security properties).
Another one of the WD drives, probably the 20, is going to Windows 98 SE, which I ran on the actual chip inside this machine (it was in an IBM PC-330 6571-W5K before this computer) for a period of about 7-8 years before the machine died. I'm thinking about recreating the entire environment I had in Win98SE at that time, complete with the Win9x, and some classic gaming creation utilities. If 98SE or 95 work out well enough, I will begin tinkering with multi-track recording my own songs on vintage hardware....who knows, I may have a way out from those MPAA/RIAA idiots ruining "Hardware Loopback" for making demo tracks.
There were some hardware anomalies...first off, I must have gone through somewhere in the area of 8-9 different 1.44MB Floppy Drives to find one that did not produce a BIOS error while in the computer. I think my VLB Multi-I/O card has some issues (either that or a wrong Jumper Setting), but I"m not letting that stand in my way.
Windows 95 did offer some insight as to something being wrong with the controller as it had a yellow "!" on it in device manager. So I may look farther into this later.
To get around this I equipped the Dell Optiplex P4 in my closet with an old white Epson floppy drive (and kudos to Dell for providing the cable and all the installation hardware inside the machine! Only took me 5 mins compared to the 15 or so needed for the 486 with 7 screws, cable routing, and working around my finicky half-home-built CPU Cooler for the DX4 processor. After that, I made all my DDO diskettes for the 486.
This morning I finally got a working floppy drive, more than half my stash of 1.44MB Floppy drives were bad. Not surprising since most of them were off the shelf from Goodwill in the last 9 years and probably had god knows what happen to them.
Speaking of floppy drives, I took out the ZIP Drive and got my B: Drive back because of it, as I discovered ONE of the floppy drives I had was not a normal MFM controlled floppy, but rather an IDE LS-120 "SuperDrive". So now I have THREE floppy drives in my 486. IT also takes a floppy power connector (which I have 2 of) and gave me a back a full sized Molex for my 5.25" 1.2MB Floppy B:\. Have not tried it out yet, but it looks cool.
Oh yeah, and during this fiasco, during the process of making overlays, I built a boot-disk that could boot up a CD or pretty much anything else I want on the computer without BIOS intervention. That superdrive may come in handy as I hear they are bootable. Would be cool to run a whole O/S install from one Superdisk.
I'm also thinking about installing some Linux variants on the machine, command line and GUI based, my old Slackware 96' distro tops the list though.
Another fiasco concerned my CD-R drive.....the first of which would not read my CD-R burned on my Pentium D machine. The second I still don't know, but when I opened it I found my long-thought-lost Windows 95 OSR2 OEM CD-ROM, we'll see how it all works out after this.
My next project will be making install diskettes for Windows 2000 Pro, installing Windows 98 SE, and working out the kinks in 95 (SBAWE32 unknown device, "broken" FDC, and getting the network card going).
First off, I have a stock of several not-so-old hard drives...
80GB WD800JB Western Digital
40GB Western Digital
20GB Western Digital
8.4 GB Seagate
7.2 GB Maxtor
3GB Fujistu
636MB Fujitsu
Crazy enough ALL drives are detected by the BIOS, all of them work (to some extent despite wrong parameters for the 3GB drive on up). So started the fun with the DDO, or Dynamic Drive Overlays. I'm super familiar with these from my old Creeping Net days, as I was using them left and right to throw 30-80GB HDD into low-end Pentium era boxes, but I'd never done this on an old 486 before!
DDO's are programs that fit on the drive's boot sector and act as a translator between the BIOS and the actual hard drive. Most of the time you are to set the drive up as a 520MB drive with 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, and 1024 cylinders (with 1024 for the landzone). However, being as my 486's motherboard has an AWARD BIOS with auto detection, most of my drives range from 800MB (80GB drive) to 2GB (8GB) in the BIOS under auto-detect, and therefore, to keep things simple (both as I prefer auto-detect, and b/c my CMOS Battery is dead and I'm too lazy to replace it), I just auto-detect the drive using the DEL key on startup to get into the BIOS and do it. I don't plan to swap too terribly often.
My primary drive for this machine for the longest time has been a 3GB fujitsu with Ontrack Disk Manager installed, split into 2 1.5GB Partitions, and having MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 installed. This setup is around 3 years old and has been strong and reliable.
My next drive I finished preparing early this morning, is the 7.2GB Maxtor, split in half, with Maxblast installed on it. It's got a fresh install of Windows 95 OSR2 OEM on it. Should be plenty of room for DOOM, Diablo, and some other mid-late 90's titles. I've got plenty of machine for it @100 MHz with 64MB of RAM and a whole load of DX4 optimization options in the BIOS. 95 loads in about 5-6 seconds! The only things left there is to get the RTL8019AS network card drivers installed (or swap it with the New in Box Linksys card I have). 95 should be pretty fun as the last time I ran it on this actual computer, I managed to get Youtube to work (don't ask me how, it's just as much a mystery to me). Sure I only had 2 frames a minute, but the audio worked perfectly - ah yes, blasting Sabbath streaming broadband while playing Final DOOM.
One of the drives is getting Windows 2000 Professional x32 SP4 installed on it, reason being that I have run that setup on a 486 before, and it was freaky quick for the usual things you'd use a netbook for. I want to use on of the huge WD drives, but it says it's DDO is not compatible with Win2K....so I'm not sure just yet. Having this would also make networking a breeze as I could connect to my Windows 7 x64 box without a hitch (as there is no "Send Unencrypted Passwords to 3rd Party SMB Servers" option in the security properties).
Another one of the WD drives, probably the 20, is going to Windows 98 SE, which I ran on the actual chip inside this machine (it was in an IBM PC-330 6571-W5K before this computer) for a period of about 7-8 years before the machine died. I'm thinking about recreating the entire environment I had in Win98SE at that time, complete with the Win9x, and some classic gaming creation utilities. If 98SE or 95 work out well enough, I will begin tinkering with multi-track recording my own songs on vintage hardware....who knows, I may have a way out from those MPAA/RIAA idiots ruining "Hardware Loopback" for making demo tracks.
There were some hardware anomalies...first off, I must have gone through somewhere in the area of 8-9 different 1.44MB Floppy Drives to find one that did not produce a BIOS error while in the computer. I think my VLB Multi-I/O card has some issues (either that or a wrong Jumper Setting), but I"m not letting that stand in my way.
Windows 95 did offer some insight as to something being wrong with the controller as it had a yellow "!" on it in device manager. So I may look farther into this later.
To get around this I equipped the Dell Optiplex P4 in my closet with an old white Epson floppy drive (and kudos to Dell for providing the cable and all the installation hardware inside the machine! Only took me 5 mins compared to the 15 or so needed for the 486 with 7 screws, cable routing, and working around my finicky half-home-built CPU Cooler for the DX4 processor. After that, I made all my DDO diskettes for the 486.
This morning I finally got a working floppy drive, more than half my stash of 1.44MB Floppy drives were bad. Not surprising since most of them were off the shelf from Goodwill in the last 9 years and probably had god knows what happen to them.
Speaking of floppy drives, I took out the ZIP Drive and got my B: Drive back because of it, as I discovered ONE of the floppy drives I had was not a normal MFM controlled floppy, but rather an IDE LS-120 "SuperDrive". So now I have THREE floppy drives in my 486. IT also takes a floppy power connector (which I have 2 of) and gave me a back a full sized Molex for my 5.25" 1.2MB Floppy B:\. Have not tried it out yet, but it looks cool.
Oh yeah, and during this fiasco, during the process of making overlays, I built a boot-disk that could boot up a CD or pretty much anything else I want on the computer without BIOS intervention. That superdrive may come in handy as I hear they are bootable. Would be cool to run a whole O/S install from one Superdisk.
I'm also thinking about installing some Linux variants on the machine, command line and GUI based, my old Slackware 96' distro tops the list though.
Another fiasco concerned my CD-R drive.....the first of which would not read my CD-R burned on my Pentium D machine. The second I still don't know, but when I opened it I found my long-thought-lost Windows 95 OSR2 OEM CD-ROM, we'll see how it all works out after this.
My next project will be making install diskettes for Windows 2000 Pro, installing Windows 98 SE, and working out the kinks in 95 (SBAWE32 unknown device, "broken" FDC, and getting the network card going).