I didn't have any cases I liked, so I just put it in a Lian-Li, so I could work on it easier. I'll skip some of this part and get right to the booting. The first time I powered it on, it gave me video BIOS, then POST, set the BIOS settings, then off. It needed a CPU speed adjustment. It was running at 180Mhz. Easy jumper move and the power was on again. It went through POST normally, and booted the Windows NT 4.0 floppy and windows installed just fine. After a while of messing around on it (installing Service Packs, software, games, etc) it was late, so I shut down and went to sleep. What it did while I was sleeping, I don't know, but I booted it the next day and NO-BOOTABLE MEDIA was a persisting problem...

So after many frustrating hours of switching drives, cables, settings, I was getting no-where. I was confident the drive with NT was GOOD (Quantum ST 3.2) and it was, but I set it aside trying to format/partition it to get this thing booting again. I switched to my diagnostic boot-anything drive and still absolute nothing. As soon as THIS drive was not booting, I had a feeling the problem might be a serious one.

I installed a Promise ATA66 PCI and switched my ribbons. Bam. Drives show up in the Promise BIOS (they were in the system BIOS, too) and it booted, but needed the drivers for the Promise, which I had on floppy. NOW, here is where some weird shit starts happening. I have only Video and ATA cards in the computer at this point. I opened My Computer and saw this:

I have two floppy drives, but NONE of them actually led to the other one. What the f?! So I disabled the floppy B: and all the phantoms disappeared. They all led to A: before. Ok. Umm. I restarted and reset the on-board ATA... Booted. Enable Floppy B: can NOT boot. What is this madness??! I decided to leave the Promise for now, since I want floppy-city.

Which leads me to the AHA-1542CF I'm installing. It has a floppy header so I can plug all three floppy drives in, at least I'm hoping. I've never had more then the normal two, so this should be fun.

I also have my weird Genoa tape drive. It is a Teac MT-2ST and indeed works with the one tape. The card for the Genoa isn't always installed, but needs to work, so I leave space. I leave the drive unplugged as well, it all uses power and I'm not always using it.

I decided to go the no-cd route for this one. Mostly because I don't have a suitable black drive (yet). I have external SCSI CD and ZIP to use with this computer as well.

Now we're caught up to today. Today I'm putting it all in a VERY SUITABLE chassis. It is the Gold Lian-Li I acquired a few weeks back. Oh, yeah. With a Pentium PRO decal on the side, this is going to look bad-ass.

I also used Clonezilla for the first time. Cloned my BigfootTS 6.4 onto the Quantum EX 6.4. Computer didn't even know what happened.

Even though I got the "DiscWizard" thing going, that was before I knew it was a Seagate thing. I just liked it more after I saw the logo. I'm actually a Quantum person. Every computer has at least ONE inside. I've almost got my whole collection running Quantum. I'll tell you, when you turn them ALL on, it is a magical wirr unlike any other. No Maxtor, WD, Seagate, IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, or Samsung have ever combined and made such a soothing symphony.

A big gold CPU in a big gold box.

You have my blessing. please continue.

is that the same case from This does not compute? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40YlYvy6H48 were there more of those ugly monsters?

luckybob wrote on 2024-12-27, 04:18:

https://media1.tenor.com/m/oQr476MwkEcAAAAd/who-hath-summoned-me-to-this-realm-satan.gif […]
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A big gold CPU in a big gold box.

You have my blessing. please continue.

1h18m after first post! Impressive! But SL25A would probably ALWAYS trig your senses 😉

But yeah, an ATX S8 board - that's cool!

Not only is it the case from the video, he got the case from the same place, 🤣. WOW
I regret not buying them all, they are awesome.

He did NO work to that thing. Those things were NASTY and became VERY GOLD after a cleaning.

Taking a nice pause on the Pro, so I can look at it for a few days.
Instead, I'm starting work on a dirty Dell. I'll name it "Dirty Dell". It is named. I got this machine from a co-worker more than 5 years ago and have been hoarding it in its "original" condition. It does work, as I tested it when I got it (didn't seem as old then) and it was the slowest computer I have ever used. It had some kind of Norton before or maybe during POST and it took many minutes just to POST. The OS was so loaded with bloat-ware and viruses as well, making it fairly unusable. I'll see what happens again, but I want to thoroughly clean it before booting again. Double check for anything cool, then format it and prepare it for it's new life. Usually takes about an hour to clean a whole thing and put it back together. The body is good, so it should turn out alright.

I'm more interested in the ppro. ^.^

That dell is iconic, but it really lacks a credit card size chunk of GOLD

luckybob wrote on 2024-12-28, 00:36:

I'm more interested in the ppro. ^.^

That dell is iconic, but it really lacks a credit card size chunk of GOLD

I actually have another PPRO computer that needs fixing, too. This Dell was doing door-stop duty and was getting in the way. Unprocessed machinery is NOT allowed in here.

The cleaning of the Dirty Dell took a bit longer than an hour, as there were lots of parts and they were all caked with dirt/fuzz. I even opened the optical drives and floppy and got them clean. Pretty much ready to assemble.

Got a sneak-peek at the specs, too. Pentium 4 SL5VH (1.6/256/400), two 512 MB sticks of DDR, GeForce2MX, SB Live! (CT4780), as well as a modem and network cards. It had an 80GB Maxtor, Dell branded DVD-ROM, and a Lite-On DVD burner (from 2006, only non-OE part, but was installed by OE service person; it still has all the plastic green drive rails on the case), and a basic Sony MPF920-F.

Major Jackyl wrote on 2024-12-28, 03:07:

Got a sneak-peek at the specs, too. Pentium 4 SL5VH (1.6/256/400), two 512 MB sticks of DDR, GeForce2MX, SB Live! (CT4780), as well as a modem and network cards. It had an 80GB Maxtor, Dell branded DVD-ROM, and a Lite-On DVD burner (from 2006, only non-OE part, but was installed by OE service person; it still has all the plastic green drive rails on the case), and a basic Sony MPF920-F.

The attachment 20241227_205040.jpg is no longer available

Very, well, clean, work og cleaning that one. But with a 1.6 Willamette it can't be blamed for feeling slow 😉

Ok. This was pretty funny. I was playing with the alignment software from my old work computer/alignment machine and found out the "KEY DISK" was empty. The "KEY" was printed on the label... Why include the floppy?!

Anywho, it did this to my hard drive. I purged it and will get back to it when a newer computer is set-up.

Going to finish the Dirty Dell today, then probably move to the Goldie.

Got it back together.

I powered it on and set the time/BIOS settings (not much in there, of course) and then put a battery in. I usually put batteries in when the computer is running, after I've set the time. It just feels a good time for it, no real reason. I let it boot onto the stock drive...

Oi... This thing took 13 minutes before it was usable at all. I thought it was done for twice, once on the WindowsXP loading screen, and again at the desktop, when I right clicked. I think this thing is actually kinda epic. Probably going to image the drive before formatting it, so I can have bottled terror that'll work in many P4 computers (probably be even worse trying to install new hardware).

This is that Norton software. I've never seen it before. It loads before Windows. I'll probably look it up later, but it seems like a "system restore" type of thing.

Hopefully there aren't any tricky partitions to deal with.

extra: There was only 328MB free on the drive (80GB) and the Norton partition was 31MB

Bottled terror - hilarious!
Cast the whole thing into a file with dd, pipe through bzip2 if you want to save some space.

Installed Windows XP on the Dirty Dell and all the drivers. Copying files

Passed benchmarks, going to game with it, make sure it's good before shelving it. It is definitely way faster without all the... everything, 🤣

Happy New Year friends! Hope it's a good one! I was sick with salmonella the last couple of days, so this post was delayed. I haven't done any work in those days, but I'll be back on it tomorrow. My brother stopped by last night for support and to drop off some SWEET heatsinks and two more Enermax PSUs that I've been waiting for to finish a few computers.

The last thing I was working on was my Gateway G6-300XL. It needed a PSU and a video card. The PSU part was easy, as this thing isn't demanding. The GPU I ended up using was a 3Dforce B-16, which is actually a VantaLT 16M, seemed appropriate to me.

The score was 373, 🤣
(2265 from '99 at default setting)

It passes all the tests, so I can start wrapping it up (cable management and such) and get on to the next thing. This thing is frikin' HUGE, so it'll be nice to have it off my desk.

Here are those heatsinks:

I pretty much have an idea as to what computers these are all going to go in. The 478 goes into DiskWizard (after I put the 3.2 p4 I got in as well). The S462 will be going into my Trinity KT which has Athlon A1000. The flat round is going on the NB of my Chaintech. I want the square one on a GPU, haven't made up my mind. The one it's on now (FX5200) crashes, so I'm going to test it one more time before labeling it "bad".

I'm about to have a lot of work in the next week playing musical heatsinks. The Lian-Li's, as you may know, needs the board removed to service ANY of the heatsinks, so lots of fun ahead.

Actually that last heatsink is a commercial product from Swiftech. For a short time they made some Hellraiser-esque heatsinks in that fashion. I think I have one for socket 478 or 775 in my storage box.

I always thought they were COOL.

I kinda miss big CHONKY copper heatsinks. They are so pretty when new, but practically impossible to keep from corroding. 🙁