If you can't get into the BIOS it could be because it is running on a similar solution to my Compaq. Here the BIOS is running of a hidden partition on the harddrive! Loose your harddrive and/or restore disc and forever forget to be able to enter it.

The old Toshiba laptop I have uses a small control program that interfaces with the BIOS to change options etc.

Oh well, I may be replacing the board anyway.

You could also get a Powerleap type adapter and install a Pentium 200 or 233 in it. If you're lucky an AMD K6-II/III might work as well. The case is super nice btw!

I've got a couple of spare K6-2s lying around, a 475 and 500 mhz. Up for grabs if you need them Vetz.

I was kind of hoping to find a board with an AGP slot for this case. I don't suppose there are any SS7 AT boards?

So, fuck it. I just picked up a P2B-S from ebay to replace the dead SS7 board. I'll keep this one as is, add a controller card, and use it for DOS. The P2B will handle early Windows games once I find a slow enough PII, and the P3 box I have will handle everything up to the XP/DX9 cutoff.

Sweet.

Now...can anyone recommend a cheap IDE controller card? Doesn't have to be much, all the parts in this thing will be complementary.

Just go SATA. Apart from the CD-ROM all my storage options in my MS-DOS Time-Machine are SATA and it works without any issues.

And yes, there are Socket 7 AT boards. Actually a LOT more than ATX.

That Compaq should take a regular Pentium 200. Any more speed and you are better off with a BX chipset machine.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Just go SATA. Apart from the CD-ROM all my storage options in my MS-DOS Time-Machine are SATA and it works without any issues.

And yes, there are Socket 7 AT boards. Actually a LOT more than ATX.

That Compaq should take a regular Pentium 200. Any more speed and you are better off with a BX chipset machine.

Compaq?

Trying to do the rest of this on the cheap. Just blew a wad of money on video cards and a new motherboard.

Actually, Mau, this machine is meant to be my DOS time machine 😀

I agree. Acer made really nice cases. Actually, considering the time period the black colour was quite rare.

I meant to say Acer of course 😀

Ok, I'm going to keep this machine as is and just use either a sata adapter or go for IDE>CF.

This will end up being my DOS machine. The PCI video card in it is kinda shitty from what I can find. Thinking of swapping it out for a voodoo3 pci or something, just to get the maximum awesomeness for 2D DOS games and Win 3.11. I guess I could also run some DOS Glide games since it'll be a voodoo in it? Not sure how bad the p100 will hamper that though.

Does anyone have any experience with the CL-GD5430 that's in here? Will it suffice to mate up with a voodoo1, or should I look for a faster 2D card as this will be running pure DOS and Win 3.11 games. Targeted range for this is 1990-1995/6.

I ran some speedsys tests with the caches on/off and it seems to slow down pretty nicely for the old stuff.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Just go SATA. Apart from the CD-ROM all my storage options in my MS-DOS Time-Machine are SATA and it works without any issues.

Got me curious... do you mean using a pci SATA controller card/adapter with SATA harddrives, or something like that ?

I know 😊 , I should probably check out those videos of yours, but... (my current browser has some problems vs youtube)

That's exactly what he means.

bestemor wrote:

Got me curious... do you mean using a pci SATA controller card/adapter with SATA harddrives, or something like that ?

Yes 😀

You need to get one with a BIOS (the cheap ones on eBay are listed as having a RAID Bios). Otherwise you can't use them in DOS.

The SATA PCI card gets around any BIOS limitations. I have a 640GB HDD in my machine. But you do need to keep software limitations in mind when partitioning and formatting.

For MS-DOS 7.1 I recommend a 60GB partition max. FDISK can't deal with disks larger than 60GB, so I use a Boot CD (Super fdisk) to create this partition. After this just format and you are good to go 😁

Haven't played around with SATA CD drives much, but they all lack analogue audio out, so IDE is the way to go anyway.

Ah, DOS 7.1.... wondered about that - me planning on DOS 6.22 would be less efficient then (disk&partition size/wasted space/would it even work?)

Though I guess there are no real reasons to not use 7.1(?).

BTW, a bootable SATA adapter card, or even IDE, is rreally hard to find.
Even the ones with a bios chip often do not boot (raid only or whatnot) or have various issues with DOS or even DOOM2 on the occation they actually complete the boot sequence properly.
And things like QEMM also does not like the added 'layer'.
(all this on 6.22 with CF adapter+microdrive)

Tried partioning and formatting the disk via PartitionMagic, on XP machine.
Which did not work well when installing DOS afterwards(looked fine in windows though), so FDISK was my only solution in the end.

MS-DOS 6.22 will work fine, but you are stuck with 2GB partitions. Now you can create for example four 2GB partitions, the only problem is that if you put such a drive into a drive reader on a desktop, Windows will only see the first partition. Linux will see all four 🙁

Well what I found is they need to have their own BIOS. meaning you can go into the RAID Bios, but apart from creating a Raid array, there is really nothing else you can do.

In the computer BIOS just setting the Boot order to boot from C and they will boot. If you have another drive hooked up to the IDE, that drive will boot first, but setting the boot order to SCSI will fix this.

Here I have two Sata drives in my Time-Machine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=filEaqh_1xs&li … gbVqyX&index=15

It was a cheap $10 PCI adapter from eBay as per this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53x9wtkNeBc&li … zgbVqyX&index=8

At around 7:30.

eBay pages are here:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/251237464717?ssPag … 984.m1439.l2649

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/330632518665?ssPag … 984.m1439.l2649

I do have two promise adapters (with 1 IDE and 2 SATA) but haven't had a need to use them over the cheap ones 😀

Update. I managed to get the board to recognize the drive that came with the computer.

The drive has a jumper option for 40-pin cable. The cable I'm using is not an older-style 40-pin, but whatever. This, coupled with setting auto-config on in the BIOS finally picked up the drive.

So, I have a 7.5g drive in here now.

I'm using Mau's newest installing DOS 7.1 video as a guide, but I had to modify it a bit as this board cannot boot from CD. I booted the CD on my middle machine and just copied the contents of the emulated A: drive to the hard disk, rebooted, and then copied it to an actual floppy.

Formatting right now, so let's see how far I can get with this as a pure DOS machine...

Turns out the drive is bad, failed big time on a scandisk surface scan. Tried my only other remaining IDE drive and...that one is bad too. Verified in another machine.

Ordered one of the sata cards linked above. Fuck it, time to modernize for the sake of playing games.

Still looking for a backup motherboard.

The case has cutouts for both KB/Mouse ps/2 ports side by side, so are there any boards you can think of that have those?