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

To: Sean W. Smith who wrote (6383)	2/17/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: Steven Bowen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Someone, helppp, I just bought a new 8.4G Matrox hard dirve (with thanks to Zuespaul for answering a lot of questions for me). My computer is an about 2 1/2 year old Packard Bell (way back when Pentium 166's were the latest and greatest). It's a 166, 48M, 1.6G, Win95, etc. I had the drive installed, formatted, partitioned, and booting to DOS. Then I just happened to cross paths with someone who does this as a profession, and he offered to finish up and install Win98 and a bunch of other software for me. He tried about 5 times and couldn't get Win98 to load. He said he's loaded Win98 on about 500 machines, and never had one that didn't load. He took the hard drive back to his shop and was able to load Win98 with no problem. So now he's telling me Win98 isn't compatible with my BIOS (must be a Packard Bell BIOS, all I get is a version number), although he's loaded Win98 on many Packard Bell machines and has never seen this problem. Anybody ever heard of a BIOS that supports Win95 and not Win98? He now just wants to install Win95 on this hard drive and be done with me. Is there a reason Win98 wouldn't work and anything that should be tried. (At the end of the Win98 load, he's getting a blue screen with some error something about VFAT, and the machine totally freezes up. He's also not getting prompted to enter any registry info, which he'd never seen before.) Thanks, Steve PS, and being mostly computer illiterate, don't ask me any tough questions. PPS Sean, I just got my Alps MD-1300 delivered yesterday. Haven't tried it yet, as was hoping to install it on this new hard drive. Still happy with yours? Run through many cartridges yet? Figuring out how many pages can print with a set of cartridges? I see Buy.com is selling the cartridges for $2.95 each. Seems pretty cheap, considering everyone else wants $5.95 to $6.95. Have you shopped for cartridges yet and found better prices?

To: Sean W. Smith who wrote (6383)	2/17/1999 8:14:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Respond to of 14778

Come on now. I think some folks at IBM would take offsense to this. Most (all?) of the IBM computers I use..used to have only IBM..have bios selection of harddrives. The capability exists..I have not seen it implemented or offered as an option to standard end users. I do have a lot of IBM Microchannel servers that rely on floppy reference disks in the event of configuration failure...not exactly a KOT concept. I am sure the idea is not new. For some reason it is not widely implemented. I am not aware of any oem that provides a second harddrive with bios boot capability as an option. Our local Fry's and Comp USA and Microcenter do not have any machines configured with two drives on display. None of the IBM nor Compaq catalogs I am familiar with offer dual harddrive bios select systems. I meet with resistance almost across the board if I want to implement such a strategy. The pat response is a blank stare. Certainly Clarence does not mean to indicate I came up with the original idea. I present the idea as it has worked well for me. I am sure you agree that a small percentage of computer users make use of a KOT harddrive. Zeuspaul