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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (1350)	6/13/1998 7:17:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Drive Image / Partition Magic / NTFS You may have answered this and it might be in the manual but I am still a bit confused. Can I load NT on an NTFS formatted disc without any FAT partitions and still use the above products? Would I have the following two options? 1) Boot from a floppy with either of the above programs and some DOS files, then proceed with either of the above programs. Will they then "see" the drive allowing me to restore an image from another disc or fiddle with the NTFS partition. 2) Boot from a second or third harddrive formatted FAT or FAT32 with the above products installed on the harddisk itself and then proceed with operations to an NTFS formatted disc? Zeuspaul ps. You might be onto something with the "Windows" modem. I may not proceed myself as I already have "fixed" the problem by buying a new machine. I will follow through and try to determine whether or not it is a Windows modem. To date my procedure for upgrading has been to milk a machine without adding dollars and then upgrade with a totally new machine. I will follow the same procedure with my current machine. It is my intent to make my next machine more user friendly regarding upgrade potential. The big box makers are out of the loop this time. Zeuspaul

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (1350)	6/13/1998 8:33:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Here's my thinking on my next Web Surfer I'll probably go all SCSI and PCI. I do not want to mix IDE and SCSI. I will have a lot of hardware so I want to keep it simple. ISA is on the way out so I do not want to waste money with new purchases. My existing machines will take their place on the home network. I will not start out with all components but will build over time. The end configuration will probably have an Adaptec AHA 3940 SCSI host adapter. I can use one channel for my slow external SCSI devices, one channel for a CDROM drive, CDR drive and some type of DVD drive. A SCSI LS 120 floppy drive could also go on the slow internal channel. ( this may depend on the AHA 3940 bios as I want to make it bootable) The third channel would be reserved for harddiscs. I would start with two 4.5 GB SCSI discs and a larger one. One 4.5 GB disc would be NT with NTFS format and the other would be FAT 32 and Win98. The third would be my backup and recovery disk formatted FAT with 2 GB partitions. Win 95 and NT would be able to access this disk as well as the reverse. In the second PCI slot (not necessarily 2nd on the board) I want a Mylex hardware RAID controller. This drive would be RAID 0 striped over three 4.5 GB discs configured for maximum performance. Drives will be in removable fan cooled bays. Backup will include drive image and maybe a tape solution in a removable bay. Plugging in a SCSI tape drive with an automated backup process sounds good to me. I would like to get some more feedback from Sean on automated tape solutions. I will put an Ensoniq sound card in the third PCI slot and wait for a PCI version of Networm's sound card. The fourth slot (physically the first) will be for the second video card. The machine will have two Matrox G200 video cards, one AGP and one PCI and two monitors (at least one 21 in monitor). The mobo will be ASUS P2B-L with a PII 333. I need the onboard LAN as all PCI slots are used. I want the 333 as I do not have to worry about counterfitting and 233 is too slow for my own personal taste. I will upgrade to 500 or 550? when the price is right. I will probably need the 14 bay case with 6 harddrives, 3 CDxx, one LS120 and a tape drive. That leaves three bays in case I forgot something. Maybe I will like the RAID and will want to expand it. I should be able to disable the floppy controller and the IDE controller and the ISA bus freeing up IRQ's. Hopefully I will not have to share any. Modem will have to go in COM 1. I will start with 128 MB RAM on one stick so I have full RAM expansion capability (512 max) Hopefully InterjetNet (they never answered my email) will come through the LAN, Street Walker will help me with this. Just my current thinking. I have not added it up yet. It would be built over time so todays prices do not mean much except for the barebones configuration. The price of the PII 333 will be affordable by the time I start. Zeuspaul