First post, by vintagely
Hi everyone! And big greetings from an aging italian dude with a weird passion for old rigs. And bad english. I'm also new around here so please don't come on strong on me too much 😀.
About the thread title: since i was 12, when i got my first pc, i had to learn very fast how to solve windows 95 issues, and after a while i became very good at problem solving. Now when people around me have a blue screen i'm the first man to look for. It's not that i have the technical preparation, it's more like trial and error. For a loooong time. And probably that's why i can't solve the problem i'm facing now.
20 years have passed, covid is here so i decided to dust off my first beloved rusty pc from the attic. An old AMD K5 100 mhz 32 MB with s3 trio 1MB --- upgraded to a pentium 200 mmx 128 MB + V2 when things were getting too slow.
Heh, the memories. And i was kinda lucky when i got it upgraded back in the day since i didn't have a clue about jumpers, dual voltage motherboards and maximum cacheable DRAM areas. Luckily, the motherboard (PC Partner MB520N) was already configured for the mmx processor, but now i'm puzzled how the k5 worked well all the time before... Well better to give less voltage than too much i guess.
Returning to the present day, the first start was a bummer. My Caviar 21600 hdd was clearly dead, and the ominous triple beeps coming directly from the hdd confirmed that. Damn, i will miss that rotating sound.
Oh well luckily there is another one. A 16 gb maxtor that was configured as primary slave and for extra storage. After setting the primary master jumper correctly and good ide cable positioning, let's see if i manage to format it and get that Win98 SE working with some Blood (yes, that game from Monolith. My very FIRST game.)
Wait, what?!? what you mean 8 gb only?
After some research, i found that the AMI BIOS is 8 gb limited. And since i'm a tough one and want things solved, i literally wasted tens of hours trying to use every DDO software under the sun to give that drive full capacity and install win98 se. Nothing. Nada. I give up.
MaxBlast 4 failed. Ontrack Disk manager failed. I tried everything. I read somewhere that i need DDO installed on the drive and to boot it before launching setup from win98 cd-rom. So i tried everything to boot the overlay. But i just failed. Oh well i'm lil tired now maybe ill create two partitions inside Windows and get that juicy extra space with a partition sotware... HA! you wish!
Obviously i failed here too. I heard that with PTEdit32 and some luck with MBR editing and i might be able to trick windows and get that extra space... but i'm very afraid since my networking speed is around 500 kb/s (why is that low btw? i'm using a 3com 905 10/100) so it's not i'm doing fast backups.
Maybe i'm not brave enough, but some precise, in-depth tutorial on how to do that kind of partition-enlarging thing would be appreciated. Also, a link for PTEdit32 since symantec ftp server link is shutdown.
Another thing. THAT DAMN USB 2.0 CARD. i can't get NUSB working with that one. it's a NEC uDP720101 something card that should work Jesus! i try to connect an EMTEC 8 GB flash drive and sometimes nothing happens, sometime it gets detected with a red cross on device manager... and SOMETIME IT WORKS WHEN WEIRD THINGS HAPPENS! (like the s3 trio card in hardware conflict 16 colours when messing around). but then i need 16 bit colours on my desktop or my eyes start bleeding... so no usb flash drives for me either.
Well the optical usb mouse does work. Ok, i'm fine with that. I'm gonna use the goddamn 500 kb/s NIC for data transfers (oh, i will not mention the mess i had to learn/do to enable SMB1 on windows 10 laptop and get the network up and operational...).
I'm done. s3 VBE20 is installed. Voodoo 2 drivers configured and ready. Time for some BLOOD and GLQUAKE!