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

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1428)	6/19/1998 10:05:00 AM
From: Dave Hanson	Respond to of 14778

Sounds like a good plan. Good luck, Zeuspaul (EOM).

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1428)	6/19/1998 12:13:00 PM
From: Street Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Diamond SupraExpress Excellent Choice. The specs are even better than 3coms's modems. This is the one that allows for ShotGun Technology. It will be interesting to see how many hours it takes you to assemble your family machine. Good Luck, S.W.

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1428)	6/20/1998 2:26:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

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

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1428)	6/21/1998 9:58:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

The Compaq Alteration...Assembly notes cont... Status I am posting from the Zeus Machine. The essential software is installed (Win95, Partition Magic, Netscape 3.0) The side panels are still off. The machine is now on the floor under the desk where it belongs. The current hardware configuration is Iwill XA 100 mobo super seven Pentium 200 MMX (Compaq) 32 MB old DIMMS (Compaq) Matrox MII 8 MB PCI two IBM deskstar 8 6.5 GB IDE two IBM Ultra Wide SCSI 2.1 GB Adaptec AHA 2940 Ultra 2 Wide SCSI adapter Diamond Supra Express modem Turtle Beach Daytona PCI sound Sony IDE CDROM (Compaq) Floppy (Comapq) Speakers (compaq) Iwill mobo The only complaint I have so far is the manual. I have not been able to figure out where the panel lights (power LED, harddisc activity) and the reset switch attach to the board. The manual clearly indicates where they go. The problem is the board connectors are not the same as the manual. The manual shows 9 pins for the connectors and the board has a double row of ten (total 20). Will I do any harm if I use the trial and error approach? Video Card I replaced the Matrox G100 AGP with a Matrox MII 8MB PCI ($219). I could not wait for Win98 and did not want to search the Microsoft site for AGP upgrades. The default driver would only let me use 640 x 480 resolution. I can only handle low resolution for 5 minutes. You simply can not get enough information on a screen. The MII is great. I set the resolution to 1024 x 768 on a 17 in monitor. Finally I have virtual resolution on my home machine. The virtual desktop area is set to 2048 x 768. That is the max I can get with 16 bit color. I set it up so the extra screen is to the right of the primary screen. Maybe I can get more if I upgrade to 16 MB RAM. I am using Microsoft trackball and the Intellimouse software. Speed is set to max with max acceleration and medium slowdown for executables. With these settings I can access the second screen very quickly with a quarter turn on the ball. I am holding onto the G100 so I can try a dual monitor setup with Win98. Modem The Diamond Supra Express has made a significant difference. I am connected at 40,000 for the first time. Pages load much faster. This still has to be considered a primary bottleneck however. Sound This has been the most difficult card to install and configure. Time consuming might be a better description. The machine had to boot several times. This card uses a lot of resources ( I believe most sound cards do) There is still one yellow exclamation in the device manager for legacy search. I hear beeps through the case speaker that is attached directly to the mobo and Tanya Tucker through the speakers. For some reason I do not hear dial tones or modem sounds. I have the CD controls and volume controls on the virtual screen to the right along with the Task Bar. Keeping the Task Bar off the primary screen lets me make use of the full screen for reading and posting. SCSI I could not resist the SCSI temptation. I opted for the Adaptec AHA 2940 U2W host adapter($399 @ Fry's). The card supports fifteen SCSI devices. There are four connectors and all of them can be used. One can mix old and new SCSI on the same card. It is recommended that one does not mix devices on the ULTRA 2 branch (two of four connectors, one is internal and one is external). If the fast and slow are mixed on this branch it will slow the ULTRA 2 devices. The adapter comes with four cables. The ULTRA 2 cable looks expensive. One cable has an in-out connector. This cable attaches to one of the two ultra SCSI connectors (50 pin). The cable has two internal connectors on the ribbon and the in-out connector on the end. At first I thought I would lose a slot as it is attached to a slot plate. I removed the plate (removed two screws). I popped out a cutout in the case and attached the in-out connector. Now I have two external connectors, one 68 pin ULTRA 2 and one 50 pin ultra. The card comes with Adaptec SCSI software, a rather extensive software package for creating CDR, CD players, SCSI utilities etc. The two 2.1 GB IBM SCSI drives ($179 each @ FRY's) are Ultra Wide drives. They did not have any Ultra 2 drives. I am not up on the differences yet. Perhaps I will pick up an ULTRA 2 4.5 GB performance drive for standard operations. I do not know the functions of my drives yet. I will have to get a feel for the capabilities befor I can decide the drive usages. At minimum one will be a KOTD (Keep On Truck'n Drive) I still have one PCI slot left. This could be used for a Mylex SCSI RAID controller. I could stripe the two IBM drives for a performance boost. I do not know how this would effect the boot sequence. The BBS (Bios Boot Specification) may or may not make provisions for two SCSI controllers. The AMI bios on the Iwill XA 100 mobo only has one SCSI option. My guess is the first host adapter found on the PCI bus would be the boot adapter. It could still work if the first adapter had no boot device. The bios would probably then move to the second adapter. Boot sequence and drive letter assignment With AMI bios set to Primary/secondary/SCSI the system boots the Primary and assigns it C: The secondary is assigned D: the lower ID SCSI is drive E: and the higher ID SCSI is drive F:. With AMI bios boot sequence secondary/primary/SCSI the secondary is C:, the primary is D: and the SCSI are E: and F: as before. With AMI bios set to SCSI / primary / secondary and the Adaptec bios set to target ID 1 the SCSI drive with ID 1 becomes C:, the SCSI drive with ID 2 becomes the D Drive , the primary IDE is E: and secondary is F:. With AMI bios SCSI / primary / secondary and Adaptec bios set to boot target ID2 the SCSI drive with (oops do not know yet, no OS on the 4th drive yet) I tried this without an OS on the second SCSI drive. The system booted IDE. Primary IDE became C:, secondary D:, first SCSI ID E: and second SCSI ID F:. With AMI bios set to SCSI / primary / secondary and Adaptec bios set to boot target 0 (no drive in this system has ID 0) the system boots from SCSI with the lower ID C: and the next ID D:, primary IDE is E: and secondary IDE is F: Partition Magic Partition magic has proven effective for cloning drives. It is by far the most useful tool I have for viewing drives and formatting , reformatting, and changing formats.( Thanks Dave). I was not able to clone the 6.5 GB IDE drive to the 2.1 GB SCSI drive. There was less than two GB of files on the larger drive but it still would not clone. I resized the 6.5 GB active partition to 1.6 GB and then it cloned. I then resized both drives back up to 6.5 and 2.1 Gb. The file copy procedure in Windows explorer might be the best way to go for some drive transfer operations as it does not care about partition sizes. (or is XCOPY easier?) Zeuspaul

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1428)	6/26/1998 12:59:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

The Zeus Machine.....Win98 Instalation Status The machine now has a working copy of Win95 on the primary IDE drive and a working copy on the secondary IDE drive. In addition the secondary IDE drive has two hidden partitions, each with an older copy of the installation of Win95. There is a working copy of Win95 on the first SCSI drive and a working copy of Win98 on the second SCSI drive. Procedure I picked up a full version of Win98 as I wanted a clean installation. $179 at Comp USA. That is quite a bit more than the version available at ESC with the purchase of a mobo or harddisc. I prepared the second SCSI drive using Partition Magic. I formatted the drive FAT 32 and set the partition active. I then set the mobo AMI bios to CDROM..Floppy..SCSI boot sequence. I wanted to see if the Win98 CDROM was bootable. I Then set the Adaptec SCSI select bios to boot target ID 2. I wanted the SCSI ID 2 drive to be the C drive. I put the Win98 boot floppy in the A drive and the Win98 CDROM in the CDROM drive. The machine passed on the CD and went to the floppy. The screen defaulted to CDROM installation so I accepted. The drivers on the boot disc proved adequate for CDROM installation. The install process indicated that I already had an OS and suggested I quit. There was an option to continue so I chose continue. Even the Compaq Deskpro Win 95 conversion/installation had indicated that an OS existed..I had just formatted the harddrive and there was no OS. I think Compaq embeds something somewhere. The installation went well. It saved my old system files which bothered me a bit. I was hoping it was not saving all the Win95 system files from all of my installations. The installation finished and then booted. The machine froze. I waited five minutes and gave up. Back to the bios to boot from the primary IDE drive with a working version of Win95. What shows up? Win 98! loading for the first time. It finds everything and starts making music. This is NOT what I wanted. Who knows what oddities were now incorporated into the OS. Also, my preference was for a clean new load. My fear was that Win 98 had infested all of my Win95 installations, maybe even the ones on hidden partitions. Back to the bios to boot off the secondary IDE drive with last nights copy. Relief! She booted to last nights Win95. Back to Partition Magic to reinstall last nights version of Win 95 on the primary IDE drive. All is fine. Once again I have a working Win95 OS on the primary and secondary drives. Win 98 is completely gone. Second Try The side panels are still off of the case. I pulled the power cable and the data cable off the two IDE drives and one of the SCSI drives. If Win98 can find these drives I am giving up and buying a DELL! This time the installation worked. The sound and video drivers did not load. I had to install the drivers from the CD's that were provided with the cards. The sound card was a little tricky. First I had to delete the device and then reinstall. Matrox install also had a problem. It froze during the installation. I updated the driver through the device manager and then it worked....except I have no virtual resolution anymore:( Most likely the new Matrox Win98 drivers will put me back in business with virtual resolution. I shut down and plugged the other drives back in. Everything works as it did before. Now I can boot Win95 from IDE primary, IDE secondary and SCSI ID1. Win 98 boots from SCSI ID 2. The next step is to use Partition Magic to clone the Win98 installation to the SCSI ID 1 drive. Zeuspaul