Can anyone recall which Vectra model could be converted to sit vertical or horizontal by rotating the drive bay cage?

oeuvre wrote:

Right now, it's running Windows 95. Got USB working and all. I want to be able to dual boot MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows 95 so I might pick up a SCSI adapter + drive for it as well.

Consider using a boot manager instead. With a bootable SCSI adapter, you can usually only boot from SCSI when the IDE drives are disabled entirely (unless it's one of those special proprietary solutions that are an option for certain motherboards). Otherwise the system will boot from the IDE drive.

Which one would you suggest?

Grub4DOS, XOSL and IBM's OS/2 Boot Manager are all decent. OS/2 Boot Manager needs its own tiny partition, but does not need OS/2 to be installed.

There's Boot Magic, too, IIRC - used to be part of Partition Magic, I think.

Found on this forum someone mentioning System Commander 7. Gave it a whirl and it worked perfectly. Installed MS-DOS 6.22 on a 700MB partition on my 4GB CF card. Setup all my games/programs/hardware/Windows 3.x stuff then installed System Commander 7. Used its OS Wizard to install 95 OSR2.5 on a FAT32 partition that claimed the rest of the free space on the CF card. Had to restore the system commander 7 bootloader after 95 installed but then it picked up both MS-DOS and 95 just fine. Here are some pictures. Thanks all!

http://imgur.com/a/9e1Vc

Both Smart Bootmanager (btmgr on Sourceforge) and Plop Boot Manager also have the ability to modify the partition table to cloak partitions when dual booting.

Good to know, thanks

I really like the looks of these pizzabox Vectras. I have the Vectra VL2 4/50se model and I love it. I upgraded it with an ATI Mach32 2MB card, SB16, 3Com NIC; swapped out the Intel SX-2 50 to an Intel DX-2 66, and upgraded the RAM from (1) 8MB FPM to (1) 16MB EDO.

Awesome! What do you do with yours?

oeuvre wrote:

Awesome! What do you do with yours?

I currently have it set up with Windows 95 and various Windows / DOS games. Not too long ago I was able to source (5 pairs!) of drive rails that fit this particular model, so it finally has a NOS HP CD-RW drive. I forgot to mention that I upgraded the original 210MB Quantum drive, which was toast, to a Seagate Medalist 3.2GB. I can't imagine the hard life this computer must have had, judging by all the dust I found inside of it when I pulled the cover off. It was amazing that it still worked and hadn't burned up. (See here: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today).

Holy crap, that is one mean dusty machine! How long did it take to clean that gunk out?

oeuvre wrote:

Holy crap, that is one mean dusty machine! How long did it take to clean that gunk out?

II'd say a good two hours between blasting the motherboard with compressed air, disassembly and reassembly of the power supply to thoroughly dust it, and pulling everything out of the case to get to the hidden dust bunnies. They were everywhere! I imagine that this must have been used in some industrial environment. i shouldn't complain too much though, I only paid $38 for it, and it came with an Intel 486SX2-50, which I've never seen before. 😁

Needs a grey CD drive 😉
Other then that nice system.
Does it have a HDD at all or just the CF card? If its just CF then you could get an adaptor like this one and simply swap CF cards depending on what you want and skip the need of a boot loader all together.

Just CF card... the setup I have right now is great.

oeuvre wrote:

Just CF card... the setup I have right now is great.

Does your hard drive bay reside behind the floppy / CD-drive? I'm curious to see how the internal setup compares to my model and yours.

Yep, it does just that. This is what it looked like when I first got it. http://i.imgur.com/Fb7J3Qy.jpg

Only space for one 3.5" drive cause there's a PCI slot for the AMD PCNet network card underneath that drive.