Hi folks
Here is my story on transporting my DOS stuff to my son's new
Athlon computer.
My son just acquired parts for assembling the following
computer:
Athlon Thunderbird 900 Mhz
Soyo SY-K7VTA-B motherboard
128 mbytes 133 Mhz SDRAM
Viper II 32 mbytes AGP video card
40 GB Quantum lct20 ATA 100
plus rest of stuff
The motherboard has an AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and an only one ISA slot
very valuable for using DOS stuff.
I installed the video card on the AGP slot,
a 56k winmodem on a PCI slot and
a Genius PnP 33.6 (full) modem on the ISA slot.
The motherboard comes with on board sound using new hardware standard
AC97 but comes with Sound Blaster Pro compatible Legacy sound
switchable from the BIOS. Port, Irq and Dma is also selectable at the BIOS.
My son originally looked for a 30GB HD but I added an extra U$ 25 and secured
extra 10 GB of real estate for my use.
I assembled everything except the HD and started the computer to look for
something wrong. The computer started ok after I messed a little with the
BIOS set up (quite complicated in fact) and ended waiting for a boot diskette
For initial Booting I made a diskette in the P166 using DOS 6.22 using
command.com
io.sys
msdos.sys
himem.sys
emmm386.exe
ansi.sys
mscdex.exe
smartdrv.exe
sbide.sys (driver for Creative CDROM)
trmouse (driver for PS2 mouse )
setpnp ( PnP modem setup utility )
dosshell
edit
conex
pictview
cfgpv
I used config.sys
DEVICE=A:\HIMEM.SYS
rem DEVICE=A:\EMM386.EXE AUTO FRAME=E000 I=B000-B7FF I=C800-EFFF NOEMS
DEVICE=A:\EMM386.EXE AUTO FRAME=E000 I=B000-B7FF I=CC00-EFFF NOEMS
DOS=UMB
DOS=HIGH
FCBS=16
BREAK=ON
LASTDRIVE=M
DEVICEHIGH=A:\SBIDE.SYS /D:MSCD001 /P:170,15 /V
DEVICEHIGH=A:\ANSI.SYS
autoexec.bat
@ECHO Off
LH A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001 /V /M:8
LH A:\TRMOUSE /P
PROMPT $p$g
setpnp /C:4 /I:3
Then I booted ok and started looking at dosshell , then mouse , then edit
some text files then CDROM all seemed OK, however I experienced some
unexpected resets.
After some thinking I took EMM386 out and started working ok, so I figured
that some of the upper memory usage in this new video card might be
different from the old Trident in P166. I ran Msd.exe and looked at
memory map and noticed that the area between C8000 and CBFFF is now used
by the new video card
So by changing one of the parameters in EMM386 from I=C800-EFFF to CC00-EFFF
solved the unexpected reset problem.
I saw some text and some pictures in CDrom , just fine.
Then I adjusted conex (short comm program) so that it matched
the setpnp /C:4 /I:3 comport 4 and irq 3 to test the modem.
It didn't work. I tryed several ports and irqs and in one occasion I made
it dial , but after spending one full day I decided that I will try to solve
this later as everything else seemed OK.
I installed the HD and decided to boot directly from On-Track Disk Manager
directly but didn't boot. So after some tries I booted msdos 6.22 and
ran Disk Manager from there and installed WIN98SE from CDrom using
FAT32. My son wanted only 1 partition of 30.8 GB and I decided for
3 partitions D: 5.0 GB, E: 2.2 GB and F: 2.0 GB previewing I might install
linux later.
I copied all my DOS stuff which was in the F: partition on my P166 to my
F: partition in the new computer so as to minimize renaming of links and
directories.
(End of part 1)
Regards
Luis A. Loeff
