All HWG,
OK, I play with old hdw. It is what I have. No, I do not plan to toss it
when it still works; or, give it a Viking Funeral just for grins. Money is
tight in retirement. Yes, I would love to own 5 Alien-Ware machines! Not
in the cards.
I do appreciate all the help this collective shares. All my "bacon saves"
have come from this group. Every one of them!
Update: My current battle with an ancient 440BX and some really odd EIDE
cabling's seems to be on the mend. I do not believe I have killed the
gremlins, but, the piece of junk seems to now work like I expected it
to...........(?)
Thank you John, for the WinXPE CD! I finally figured out that choice #5
gets me the most H.P. I can command. I now have the single (very old) IBM
hd identified, partitioned, and formatted, and labeled, to a state that I
can re-start my original testing. It is now c:\, fat, 1.01GB. About what
I was looking for. Now, I can start all over again. I never thought I
could so totally screw-up a simple system! Guess what? I can! LOL!
Do I think that this machine's bios is "crisp" yet? No way. I know that
there are still some 1998 ghosts hiding that may still cause some more
head-scratching. Maybe a fresh re-flash is in the cards........ :)
But, for now, the old pig now looks/acts like I expect it too. The P2-450
is happy at 100F, and all the 512MB of RAM is seen and in use. No, I'm not
certain about the power off stuff yet. This dumb old stuff is fun! Well,
for me anyway.......
Gave up on the EIDE fight. The hd is a master on EIDE0. The CDROM is a
master on EIDE1. It does work now. BIOS now sees (and displays) both
devices during post! This is a big change. Screw a bunch of
jumpers! Screw the colored connectors! Heck, the m/b has a metal pins at
pin-20 of both EIDE connectors that should not be there (I am lead to
believe)! Enough!
Moving forward. Thank you for all of your patience, support, suggestions,
and comments.
Best!
Happy New Year!
Duncan
