Re: System hangs when accessing floppies

Posted on 2012-11-22, 06:15

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

you sure you got the floppy cable the right way Yes, I'm sure - as I said, it only happens when I try to access an actual disk in the drive (if I'm doing nothing with the FDD its LED is off, and if I'm accessing it with no disk present it returns the usual not-ready/abort/retry/fail/etc message, …

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System hangs when accessing floppies

Posted on 2012-11-21, 13:01

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A few days ago I got a complete IBM PC Server 325 (8639-ES0), and after a whole week-end of (dis)assembling, dusting, washing and drying its parts I put it back together and started testing stuff... The issue that's bothering me right now is that the thing hangs instantly when trying to access a …

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Re: Questions about a Voodoo Rush card

Posted on 2012-11-17, 21:26

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Great info so far... in the meantime I started testing the card on a Win98SE, K6-2/400 - based system that I had around. After having to take the mainboard out of the case (card too long, not enough room) and having to lower the GPU clock rate in the .inf file and the registry (in order to fix the …

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Questions about a Voodoo Rush card

Posted on 2012-11-17, 16:23

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Today I got this card together with an IBM PC Server 325 (Intel Pentium Pro inside), and while it's drying after a thorough wash I thought I'd gather some info that could ease testing later on: https://sites.google.com/site/iulianvshw/video/rush-front.jpg https://sites.google.com/site/iulianvshw/ …

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Re: The METAL thread

Posted on 2012-10-31, 15:37

by

by iulianv

in Milliways

in Milliways

Now where do I begin... for me it all started some 20 years ago when someone from school gave me Nirvana's Nevermind to listen to; then I moved to Queen, Manowar, Megadeth and Metallica (probably not in that order), then came Lake of Tears, Theatre of Tragedy, Therion and Lacrimosa. Right now I like …

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Re: Any ideas for a non-responsive 486 motherboard?

Posted on 2012-10-05, 05:20

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've experienced something similar (PSU won't spin its fan, but would slightly buzz instead) with a 386 board after inserting the CPU wrongly oriented. It doesn't seem to be the case in this photo though...

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Re: Cirrus Logic CLVGA542XVL 2MB VLB or S3 Vision864 1MB VLB

Posted on 2012-10-03, 10:11

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If I find 512kb video ram chips that will physically fit for upgrading the S3 card, will they work? Or are there some other specifications that will need to be met? FPM vs. EDO (most likely you need FPM - when you get your hands on the chips just google them for datasheets) access time might also …

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Re: The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread!

Posted on 2012-09-18, 05:40

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, last night's "debugging session" was pretty weird - with 128MB of RAM I couldn't even get near the ~12m time, all I got was 16-17m :(. After removing one of the two 64MB sticks I got 11m26s (with RAM settings maxed out - since it's PC100 CL2, it should do PC66 with any settings a mainboard …

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Re: The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread!

Posted on 2012-09-17, 07:26

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How important are the FSB and the memory for SuperPI? On a 430TX-based board I got around 12m22s with a K6-2/400 (compared to a littler over 9m with an MVP3-based board in the original post)... One difference is the FSB (my CPU runs 6*66), and then my Win98SE might be running outside cacheable RAM …

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Re: Which Linux on a 486 ?

Posted on 2012-09-13, 05:38

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

When I was a sysadmin for my College some 12 years ago we had a 486 (can't remember any details, though) routing and firewalling three or four computer labs - it was happily running RedHat 4.x. It was called Balder (all servers had names taken from the Norse mythology - students' server was Fenrir, …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-10, 19:07

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, I do have a floppy disk that came with the mainboard and contains a BMIDE folder, but I suspect it's for Win95... I did try the Triones v3.70d drivers though, which didn't even allow me to boot Windows (well, at least not within reasonable time). The interesting thing is that going back from …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-09, 15:37

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

According to the latest plan, I'm back to Win98SE (this time without the unofficial service pack), on K6-2/450 (6*75) and 128MB of RAM. It's running pretty well, but obviously something always has to be wrong - this time is Device Manager's DMA setting for the hard-drive: when enabled the whole …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-07, 08:19

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

83MHz FSB might be too much for the PCI bus, I think I'll stick to the moderate 75 :). Isn't K6-III "the same" as 2+/III+ when it comes to RAM cacheability? I mean, K6-III has on-die L2 cache too, right? I don't have any +, but I do have a K6-III/400AFR that I could try, and if the BIOS acts weirdly …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-07, 05:14

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, I installed Win95 OSR2.5 last night, and it didn't blow me away at all in terms of speed, compared to Win98SE. So I guess I'll throw in 128MB of RAM or even max it to 256 (despite 430TX's limit in cacheable size), put a K6-2/450 (6*75) instead of the 400, and go back to Win98SE... 2.7GB of HDD …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-05, 19:47

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I finally found an unofficial BIOS for Acorp 5TX29 with support for K6-2+/III/III+: http://web.archive.org/web/20021007192939/http://bios.rom.by/Acorp/socket7.htm The "Review" link (in Russian, but Google Translate does a decent enough job) shows how to set the undocumented 83MHz FSB, so if I had …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-05, 19:05

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, tonight's debugging session went pretty weird (to a good end though, hopefully permanent). Armed with a multimeter borrowed from work, I started the board on a different PSU (still AT, not ATX) - it worked like a charm through two passes of memtest, and would still work after doing all sorts …

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Re: Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-05, 05:23

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, I'm using an AT power supply, which so far gave me no reason to suspect of anything bad (it holds a full slot1 system just fine); I will try ATX tonight (no jumper for that here). I'm not mixing RAM modules (each time I used either a pair of identical DIMMs, or just one DIMM - and tried both …

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Random POST of socket 7 board - really frustrating

Posted on 2012-09-04, 18:01

by

by iulianv

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a FordLian/RedFox TX-5IB2 board that I was planning to base some Win95 system on these days, but after putting everything together I discovered that it wouldn't POST. The board had been previously (and successfully) tested with a K6-2/333 CPU, so I took the board out and tried that CPU again …

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Re: Age of Empires and S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP

Posted on 2012-09-03, 10:03

by

by iulianv

in Windows

in Windows

If it's not too much trouble... was there any Trio 3D/2X for PCI?

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Re: Age of Empires and S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP

Posted on 2012-09-03, 09:51

by

by iulianv

in Windows

in Windows

I don't think it was designed to use Glide...

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