So my uncle sent me two new computers in the mail a while ago, and they finally got here. To say the least, they're messed up BAD. But considering the fact that one of them had a 512 stick of ram in it (making it officially the best computer in my house), I'm willing to futz around with them and get them back into working condition. The downside to the whole thing is the now immense proliferation of computer equipment throughout the basement here. This turned into my Mom's dream situation where she was fina;;y able to just say "Kit, throw away some of your old computers, you have enough already." Hence the RIP for the pile of old crappy servers. Anyway, onto some general specs and information about what I've been doing to these monstrosities.
Well, the first step was to sift through all the crap he gave me with them. There was a huge pile of cables (IDE), a bunch of covers for other computers (yes, you read right, covers for computers besides these computers), and, of course, two new comps. Just so that you know, these computers are is WAY better shape right now then they were 24 hours ago. When they first came basically all the parts (including the heatsink, fans, and cables) were just sitting inside the box and I had to re-attach them. I went ahead and flashed the BIOS on one (one is still just sitting there RAMless), and started trying to get it back into working order. What did that entail? Well, glad you asked!
It started where I put all the jumpers into the right places, and making sure everyone was happy with their master/slave positions. I actually ended up wrestling with them because it was not happy about having the ZIP disk drive as an IDE secondary master, so it had to unplug it. Not sure weather or not I'll be able to install it later, but for now it's just plain dead. So then I wrote zeros to the drive (to assure myself of a clean install) and started to get to "the good stuff." By "the good stuff" I mean the OS and software and all the things I actually plan on using. So I pop in my WinXP pro disk...
It starts up fine, and scans my hardware. Suddenly, in mid scan, it dies! Odd... I try it again, again it dies. All during the loading of SCSi drivers. This is rather disturbing, and I've seen the same thing happen while trying to load knoppix onto it. Errors during SCSI probing. Hmmm... I check my cables and whatnot and check a few jumpers, I watch the BIOS boot up closely. Well, nothing seems to be wrong (still) but third times a charm and for no apparent reason, WinXP starts installing. It gets as far as the partitioning and I notice something else odd: It's not letting me use all of the hard drive! 8mbs remain untouchable despite all my efforts. Well so be it, I wasn't gonna let 8mbs kill me in a 40gig drive, so I proceeded with the install. It partitioned the drive fine, then immediately told me that the partition was unusable. It told me to run CHKDISK, which of couse is impossible unless you already have windows installed. So I tried a few more times to re-partition it, and even re-flashed the BIOS and still nothing. I was exasperated and decided to try something completely different: Just go for a Windows 98 install because it'd work fine no matter what.
Dinner break
Sure enough, Windows 98 installed flawlessly, and I think I'm gonna run diagnostics on the hard drives from here. Anyway, that's what's been up on my end. I would post more, but I need sleep. Tommorow I'm seeing a movie pretty early on in the day, followed by poker. So no more update. And if you REALLY NEED the description of the other four pics...
Leftover computer equipment from the old comps I threw out and a bag of new stuff
Detail on the floppy disk stack and zip drive
two of the four HDs that came with the comps and the two floppies that I use to flash the bios
sounds interesting, you assmebled them almost from scrtach. Must have been fun
Posted by: brian at March 5, 2005 08:38 AMwhoa! u have war3 the frozen throne!? KEWL!
Posted by: ben at March 5, 2005 02:29 PMgod ben is annoying, jesus christ how can any of you even put up with him? or do u do it just cause u pity him? thats the only reason I can come up with
Posted by: Anonymous at March 5, 2005 04:55 PMGod damnit Ben, stop trying to weed out your enemies through that tactic. It won't work.
Posted by: Kit at March 5, 2005 07:50 PMKit, I dunno if this would work, but it might. I found an entry for scuzzstuff. It takes a while to load, those numbers just mean that its loading. It is pretty awesome though. You might have already known, and it is probably big for scuzzstuuf, anyway:
http://www.rasterwerks.com/dev.public/phosphor_alpha_4_248.htm
Could someone tell me how to link please, it would be easier. Thank you in advance.
I swear Kit, one of these days you have to meet my cousin. O'course...you'll probably run in to each other when you end up going to the same college. He's a carbon copy of you, but shorter and more wary of driving a car (don't ask, he's over it now anyway). He likes TMBG and has assembled at least 20 comps of his own. I swear you plagiarized some of this post from things he's said to me somehow.
Posted by: Eric at March 5, 2005 10:46 PM