samaron wrote:

The system would hang. I disconnected the slave CD-ROM and everything worked. When booting the computer I could see that the drive I disconnected would identify it self as "CD-RJ $OPEN" instead of "CD-RW AOPEN", as an example. Is the drive faulty, causing the DOS CD-ROM drivers to crash?

Prolly a cable problem 😉

Very possible... The IDE cables have been bent, folded and twistet a couple of times... Might have a broken lead. I'll change it and see how it goes. 😀

Any suggestions on the CD-ROM driver? Any lightweight driver that works, if such exist? I'm currently using a NEC driver which I copied from my 486 computer.

VIDE-CDD.SYS has a pretty tiny footprint.

That oldschool water block is badass... reading about the pioneers of watercooling is so cool (no pun intended) to me! Nowadays you just build a watercooling setup (like mine) with completely off-the-shelf parts, and while it's still awesome (and great that it's so much more accessible), it's not the same as having to make everything custom and by hand. That's a whole other level of dedication.

samaron wrote:

I had one small issue when loading the CD-ROM drivers when booting from the startup disk. The system would hang. I disconnected the slave CD-ROM and everything worked. When booting the computer I could see that the drive I disconnected would identify it self as "CD-RJ $OPEN" instead of "CD-RW AOPEN", as an example. Is the drive faulty, causing the DOS CD-ROM drivers to crash?

I had to work through an identical issue yesterday including the funny device name during POST. I didn't have a spare IDE cable handy to check but my goodness did it take me awhile of trying to fix it in software and drivers before I decided to test the drive as a slave on the primary IDE as opposed to master on the secondary. It worked like a charm. I still need to check to make sure it's not the controller going bad because that would make me a sad person.

I had a same problem. I just moved around the cable and... voila!
Some contact was probably not connected or so. But the ide cables suffer from moving around and messing too much with them. The quality also matters a lot: I bought 2 dirty cheap brand new from ebay, and both were brocken on the 2nd-3rd use...

Today I got a 5 1/4" floppy drive that I bought on eBay. This one have been tested and recalibrated before shipping. Nice old 1,2mb drive. Wanted one to be able to copy and back up old data from my 8088 PC.

Very cramped inside the case now, but it fits! Had to move a couple of cables and change one out with a longer type.

Even got this nice transport cardboard piece.

Enabled the drive in BIOS and booted up. Worked like a charm.

The old games even started up. Although not playable, as the CPU is too fast. The computer these programs are made to run on is 4,66MHz, not 200. 😀

Last note, which isn't fun at all.... After copying 4 disks, the drive stopped working! It registers in Windows, it gives that sound all floppy drives does when booting the computer and I can hear the disk spin inside. It simply doesn't want to read disks all the sudden... DOS gives a general read error, while Windows insists that all disks are not formatted. Any suggestions? Would be a shame if I spent $70 on something that broke within the first 15 minutes of use...

A lot of vintage floppies I come across have media damage. Either the surface flakes off when the drive head presses against it, or it actually has fungus growing on it. These will contaminate the drive heads and cause the symptoms you describe. I'd try cleaning the heads with some isopropyl alcohol before you assume it's dead.

The more I look at the pictures, the more I like this setup 😁

Wouldn't 5.25" floppy drives have been obsolete by the late 90's? Almost everything would have been released on CD ROM by then, and anything still released on floppies would have been on 1.44mb 3.5".

They stayed around longer than they should due to this very reason that people had a lot of old disks with valuable data/programs.

Exactly the reason I have one. I have a few disks from my 8088 PC that I want to copy and backup. This build is meant to be multipurpose, not just gaming. Now I'm very happy with the machine. Would like to have an internal ZIP drive as well, but it is simply not enough space left I'm afraid...

Got a new 5.25" floppy drive from the seller a couple of days ago. Haven't died yet, so guess it is a success! The color is matching the rest of the computer as well. 😀

If u don't write cd's, u could loose the cd-rw drive and get a zip drive instead.

Internal ZIP drives are 3.5" aren't they?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internal_zi … de_computer.jpg i think they come in both sizes.