Last night was an interesting mess....
Got 4 more hard disks, one won't spin but it's not stiction, one knocked so hilariously I took video of me messing with it, and the cat was amusingly looking at it like "what the heck is that thing (knock knock)....should I swat at it, sniff it, or try to eat it?". The other two, a 20GB WD200 and a 250GB WD2500 both work just fine. Put the 250GB in my 486, not sure what I'll use it for, but we'll see, 🤣. Took apart the two that don't work, threw the screws in the other one that did not work and put the lid back on just for giggles....did surprisingly little....might swap the platters for another fun experiment.
Slapped the 20GB in the Dell DImension 3000 and put that one right. I'm surprised to find Dell would apparently replace your recovery CD with one with a newer O/S. The PC is marked for XP, but it has a VISTA recovery CD, and it runs surprisingly well considering it's a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. That was a breeze.
Meanwhile, played with seeing what CD's my 486's would boot with the DDO'd 250GB Drive.....I managed to start booting Kolibri Linux, and a couple new BSD Variants, I think I even had a x64 version that somehow managed to do something for a short bit before rebooting the system, probably due to invalid opcodes. Thinking about making a huge Multi-Boot, Multi O/S HDD (Thinking DOS 6.22/WFWG311/Win95/Win98SE/Win2000/OS2 2.1 w/ WinOS2/OS2WARP/Slackware96......maybe a modern i486 compatible linux distro.....this is going to be fun).
But the real fighter of the night - the FitPC Slim, a AMD Quark LX800 based thing in a case the size of a Fuzz Pedal....which I slapped in a 128GB mSATA SSD in a 44-pin converter into. Now THIS was a challenge. First off, I hear it shiped with Gentoo LInux or Windows XP......Home or Embedded IIRC....I decided to get heady and use my old XP Pro SP3 Install on it....
First off, the FitPC, I tried putting FreeDOS and 98 on it and the results just were not to my liking. IT's just too fast for FreeDOS and has not enough Driver support for 98 SE. I toyed with 2000 until I realized I probably don't have enough of the correct drivers, and there's a chance XP Pro would have the right drivers, or enough to make it happy.
Then came getting XP on the darned thing, being the size of a Radar Detector ...there's no Floppy Drive, no CD-ROM drive, I don't have the PCMCIA or CF-Card option, and I don't have any PCMCIA media or CF Cards anyway (yet).
Attempt one found me making a bootable USB drive with my XP Pro install files on it, apparently 64GB Flash drives make this thing miserable, it'd just bypass the drive, try an older drive, nope. Honestly. Seemed like if it did try, it would hang the system.
So next I figured, slap the SSD into the Dell and reimage with XP that way.....then when I put the imaged SSD in there, which only took about 30 minutes to install at most BTW, it would hang on the FitPC (sigh)....okay....time to get the nuclear option.....
I took apart the FitPC, snapped a shot of it's WiFi controller and chipset, then put it back together, and decided maybe a USB-CD-ROM would work, but in lieu of one, I used my IDE/SATA device to USB converter instead and used that with the Dell's DVD-RW to image the FitPC via the fit PC and THEN, and only then did it take XP and boot, and honestly, for something that's only 500MHz and has about 512MB of RAM on-board, it runs surprisingly well.
Finding drivers was a total pain in the rear......see, everything except WiFi is on the AMD Quark LX800 microprocessor, so I had to nab drivers from other LX800 equipped devices to get it to work, and work they did, by the end I had everything but WiFi and a "USB Controller"....go figure, USB works just fine.
The WiFi was a QCOM branded thing, that turned out to need an RALINK driver for it after some Duckduck-fu. 54mbps, 802.11b/g, but compatible with WPA2-PSK, so I have WiFi now, one of the things that attracted me to the darned FitPC in the first place. Once that was going, it was about 1:52p, and what spurred a lot of this was some dramatic external shit I'd rather not get into. Working on computers and rocking out on the guitar during progress bars is how I keep myself sane.
So I guess, if I have more time tonight, I'll try loading some games on it, thinking "The Sims" possibly, maybe some other stuff that does not need a powerful graphics card.