Oh the joys of early 00's hardware...
Been building my not so totally old stuff into systems someone wants to use for charity. No idea what OS they intend to use, but so as to be sure everything works - and to be able to show that's the case, have installed Lubuntu onto them. Once it's installed, it's plain sailing. But until then rather less so.
The first system is based on an Asrock AliveNF6G-VSTA with an A64 X2 4000+ and 4GB of DDR2 in it. No speed demon, but basically still serviceable for any modern OS and non-gaming, non-HPC use you'd want to throw at it. Should be a breeze, right? Well, first I had physical issues in the case I chose for it - the board is rather wide and the case very compact, so the space for an optical drive was limited. Even though I try to avoid optical if at all possible, playing DVDs is a use case for this kind of system. And of course, none of my DVD drives - not even a very short Samsung one - fit. A CDRW didn't really seem suitable. So had to disassemble the system and build it into the other, larger case. Then came the software install. The board has 4 SATA ports, but Linux didn' like them. Whether it was the motherboard BIOS or a compatibility issue I don't know, but even though I could detect and partition the SATA drive, and it was available as an option for installing the bootloader, the Lubuntu installer stubbonly refused to list it as a possible install target. In the end I just gave up and grabbed my newest PATA drive. At 320GB it was actually larger and newer than the 80GB SATA drive anyway. That workde fine.
Second system was older, an MSI 645E Max2 SiS645DX based board. I wanted so use it with my fastest So478 CPU, a P4 3.06/533 Northwood, but even though the FSB was supported, it wasn't in the QVL and the board refused to boot with it. So had to drop down to 2.56/533, which worked fine. Here the software issues were with booting. This board had USB boot as an option, but stubbornly refused to actually boot from any bootable USB stick. In the end, I downloaded the image on the Athlon64 X2 system and used its DVDRW to burn a disc. Good test: works fine. And the MSI 645E happily booted from it.
Will be glad to get this junk out of the way. Compared to my modern PCs (C2D to i7, all with SSDs) they are slooow, and compared to my old <=P3 DOS & Win98SE systems they are also slow as hell, particularly the P4. Maybe tomorrow I can actually have some fun on my old stuff instead of just testing & installing. But I'm also expecting new old hardware, so probably not yet. Self-inflicted frustration 😉
