The Compaq Alteration....Assembly notes
Status
The machine is on a side table with the front bezel and side panels off. The floppy, CD-ROM, mobo. CPU, CPU fan, video card, TWO harddiscs, Win95, Partition Magic and Drive Image are installed. The machine boots to Win95 and seems to work fine, so far.
Assembly Notes
Cables
Installing both the floppy and IDE cables has been one of the more difficult tasks. They will go on two different ways and there is no simple way to figure out which way. The Compaq cables had a removed pin in the connector and a filled spot on the cable. With this setup one can only put the cable in one way. Some have large center notches and tabs which make it clear. Some I can only figure out by comparing to the way Compaq fit the cables together.
The mobo came with one floppy ribbon cable and one IDE ribbon cable. I made a trip to the Fry's (local computer store) to purchase a second IDE cable so that I could connect the IDE CD-ROM to the second IDE channel. I have one harddisk on Master IDE channel 0, one harddisc on slave channel 0 and the CD-ROM on master IDE channel 1.
Cooling
The Pentium 200 MMX seemed very hot after about 20 minutes of use. I had installed the heat sink from the Compaq. The mobo manual indicated one must use a CPU fan. Maybe the CPU runs hotter in the Iwill mobo or perhaps they are being cautious..I do not know. I did not want to take any chances so back to the store again to buy a CPU fan. $39 for the most expensive ball bearing fan they had. The only other fan is the one built into the power supply.
Video Card
The Matrox Productiva AGP G100 is using a generic driver. I get a general video failure if I load the Matrox drivers. I believe this is because my version of Win95 does not support AGP. I tried loading mobo AGP support but the message was , must have OSR 2.1 or later. I will wait for Win98 to solve this problem.
The OS load
This was a little tricky. I could not figure out how to access the CD-ROM from a floppy boot. I loaded a Win 95 floppy OS which then enabled the CDROM. I tried to load my CD-ROM version of WIN95 but it would not load because it did not like the OS already installed. Then back to the store again to buy another IBM deskstar 8 6.5 GB harddisk. I copied the CD-ROM to the second harddrive. I then disconnected the first harddrive, booted from DOS floppy and installed the CD-ROM version direct from the harddisc.
It worked! I had an operating system on each of two discs, both on an active partition.
I then tried changing operating systems by changing the boot sequence in the AMI bios. I was able to boot either disc by just changing the sequence.
With this ability to maintain a working system I felt comfortable experimenting with the OS load, always keeping one working OS. I deleted the OSR A load as it does not support FAT 32. I tried copying disc two to disc one with Drive Copy from Power Quest. It fought me a little because partition sizes were different. I then executed Partition Magic and deleted everything on the first drive. I used Partition Magic to copy the OS partition on the working drive to the other drive. I now had the latest OS on both drives but they were both formatted FAT.
I think I prefer one large drive as there will be less confusion with drive letter assignments. Back to Partition Magic to change the format. I named my harddiscs NO1 and NO2 to minimize confusion. (the OS copy also copied the volume name so I had to change it back). Now one drive is FAT and the other is FAT32. Both still boot to a working OS.
Zeuspaul |
