IBM PC aaaargh

Hi all;

Got this IBM here, it's destined to become what I call a kidzPC. This is where
I blow it out the door for between $50 and $100 so that someone who normally
couldn't have a PC can. I encourage them to use up their freebies with any ISPs
for which they can get a disk.

Now I bought this thing, an IBM tower, it's a socket 370 based Celeron
processor at 433Mhz. The dude brought it over and it POSTed fine so I payed up
and that was that. He did tell me that this was a transplant, and you can tell
because the front panel wires are spliced. Nonetheless I saw no reason to
reject it for that, it did post, came with the processor and 64MB, and it would
be a good deal, except. . . . . .

Damthing won't take an OS !

Tried to load 98SE on it and it took all night, then it gets to the reboot
point and it will not boot from the HD, starting with the floppy I see all the
files that are supposed to be there, and yes this HD was FDISKed and formatted
in this PC, but again it took significantly longer than I thought it should.
Since it doesn't work I guess I was right. At this point I suspect maybe the
HD, which was used, so I put in a pulled HD that already had 98SE on it and it
booted fine except for looking for mobo drivers and stuff. Now what ?

This is going to be a cheap PC, less than $100, how much less depends on the HD
it gets and if I can find some RAM for it. Since it'll boot from a HD with an
OS, am I better off just copying the Windows CD to it and then installing ? I
think this would probably work, but if it does, will this make all other things
off the CD slow ? This thing should support a lower speed burner but not if the
CD access if screwed up. It's not the HD nor access to it, proven by it's
behaviour when I plugged in a HD with the OS already installed. I really don't
want to have alot of time into this, and I know of someone who really wants it
and I can't get ahold of the guy that sold it to me.

Does IBM BIOS have some kind of protection against installing an OS or
something ? I suspect this mobo is for a workstation because the BIOS defaults
don't seem right. I can elaborate at a later date, but I don't like IBM BIOS,
and if the guy woulda told me it was an IBM I probably woulda toldim find me
something else. (he's a computer vulture)

Maybe when the Windows protected mode drivers get loaded it will be fine, maybe
not. There is nothing in the asset tag, and I don't know just where to look for
the numbers on this board. All I know is that it's a socket 370, and if it was
upgraded to a 433Mhz Celeron it must be old.

A penny for your thoughts (that's all that's in the budget)
If you want the money for your two cents worth you must fill out form 4366 and
addendum A. Send it registered mail along with the four cent application fee,
the five cent approval fee and twenty nine cents for the money order. Also
include an S.A.S.E. with any special delivery instructions such as, I have a
car in the driveway, or I have a basement or a tree on the property. Note there
is an extra charge for this.

Now you <u>have</u> heard everything.

JURB

 

Which is a wise and very social idea. Congrats!

Thought you were talking about an Operating System? How about RedHat? I'd
even ship you a set of SuSE Linux 8.2-CD's, which is, especially for
genral-purpose-computers, even more handy (IMHO. I didn't had my paws on
more recent RedHat-Distributions) than RedHat. It even runs certain
Windows-applications out of the box an is a wizard when it comes to
peripherals. It even managed to set-up my Winmodem (Which WinXP from my
Notebook didn't even find !).

But perhaps not to be bootable? Windows seems to be very obnoxious about HOW
you format drives. Sometimes something like format c: -s or similiar is
needed to get it working, plus the primary partition needs to be tagged as
active, otherwise IBM-Clones tend not to boot of the corresponding HD at
all. I'm, amongst other systems, an Amiga-User, so I do not understand
these complications at all (and will never accept them), and when you use
Linux on an x86 none of those restrictions applies, too, so that's why I
suggest ditching Windows for something real. Plus, you get some gigabytes
of usefull software for free already with your (cheap and affordable) OS.

Probably the HD was not formatted to be a system-Disk or "C:" was not tagged
as an active Partition

NExt suggestion referring to your system: Enter Bios and check in which mode
the HD runs. maybe some fool set it to pio mode 0, which would result in a
mere 2,5MB/sec plus intense CPU-load. It should do at least pio mode 4
(16MB/s) or even UDMA16 or UDMA33 (virtually no CPU-load).

No, it's just that you might need to set some settings in the Bios to enable
Windows to run on it. OS/2, Novell, Unix and Linux usually get along even
with badly set Bios. At least did OS/2 cope with a wrong OS/2 specific
setting on the computer of my former boss.

Not necessarily. Some fools make fun of toggling Bios settings.

Mobo & CPU Athlon 700 for 70$... I saw this lately as an upgrade-option for
outdated ATX-computers. Makes a reliable small homeserver.
I prefer Sparc or PowerPC hardware, though. But currently I can't afford
either, so I stick with my good old MC68060 in my 'miggy and an Athlon 1200
in my ShoeBox.

 

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 12:20:09 +0100, Aries Quitex

Everything Quitex said, however there are a couple of fundamentals.

I don't think it's specifically rejecting an O/S install..
Installing Windows is one of the most I/O and memory-intensive tasks
you can do, if the hardware is marginal the PC may seem to work ok but
will fail in just a couple of tasks. For instance Winrar may extract
an archive allright but it fails to create an archive, or the results
are corrupted. Photoshop may seem fine until you go to render a .png.
Opening Media player will give a "file not found" message or will
sometimes cause a bluescreen. Meanwhile all your Office applications
and email etc. work perfectly.

So the first thing to do is set the BIOS to "Safe defaults."
regardless of where it is now.

Secondly, if the CDom and boot Hard drive are on separate IDE cables,
as they should be, then make sure the devices are at the END of the
cable. All too often I'll see a PC where one drive has been removed
leaving the other one in the middle of the cable, and the excess just
rolled up. This causes reflection resulting in the same errors as bad
memory.

Thirdly, take the memory OUT, wipe the contacts with Alcohol or head
cleaner and carefully and properly reinstall the Sdrams.

Fourthly, a lot of bad memory was made between 1998 and 2001. If the
memory was installed or upgraded during this time it may indeed be
marginal. Try new memory.

Once all this is done, reformat the drive and try again. That's all I
can offer. Linux is indeed a better O/S but I can understand that you
don't want to reinvent the wheel in this case. Win98se is better than
win98 or (Gasp! Shudder!!) WinME. Your system will take Win2K
however, and that is the most stable of all of Microshit's O/S's.

. Best of Luck!!..

. Steve ..