Harry Potter wrote on 2023-06-30, 13:08:

Hi! I used to have a Win98SE tower at my mother's house. My mother bought for me some hardware for it: a hard drive, a CD drive and a Zip100 drive. They were never installed. The hard drive was only about 6.4GB, but, even though the hard drive already on the system had 20GB capacity, only 2.1GB was working. Recently, I got a new Win98SE minitower, so, now, the hard drive and CD drive are no longer needed. I have a Parallel Zip100 drive hooked up to it but really want to replace it with the internal one I mentioned. Is the swap easy to do? Can I do it myself? Regarding the other hardware: what can I do with them? I'd prefer a little money for them, but charity is good. 😀

What's the detailed specification of this "old" Win98SE tower? This could be the hybrid DOS/Win98SE machine you are looking for in your other thread.

"The hard drive was only about 6.4GB, but, even though the hard drive already on the system had 20GB capacity, only 2.1GB was working."
Wait a second, how were your HDD partitioned? You said "I can even partition and format the HDD myself" in the other thread, but this "only 2.1GB was working" sounds really like you partitioned the HDD with FDISK of DOS 6.22 or earlier and only used its primary partition.

I'd suggest you keep them before you finish building your DOS machine; even after then they can be kept as spare parts. If you are in desperate need of money or space, I'm sure there are many potential buyers online that are happy to purchase them from you.

The hard drive was partitioned with I think the versions of FDISK and FORMAT that came with Win98, as FDISK supported FAT32 drives. The partitioning worked, but, every time I tried to format the drive, after 11%, every sector was a bad sector. I did this several times and then tried to partition only the first 11% of the drive. Then, it worked. And regarding building the DOS machine: I might be able to install devices but don't fully trust myself with the install. I can't build a totally new system myself.

It is not the hybrid computer. I wanted to hybrid a new Win98SE computer. The old Win98SE systems's specs included a Pentium 2 computer and 128MB RAM. I had a RAMdrive installed on it but don't remember its size. It had two USB ports and a CD drive that stopped working. I was using a flash drive to act as a second hard drive. It had good sound so had to have a decent sound card. I had it set to its maximum resolution of 1280x1024 at 32-bit colors. I really want to sell it, but it's too good to sell as for parts but not good enough as fully working.

I still don't get it so please explain it to me: you are looking for a fast DOS system and you have a working Pentium II that you want to sell? So why exactly don't you want to use that one?

HanSolo wrote on 2023-06-30, 19:44:

I still don't get it so please explain it to me: you are looking for a fast DOS system and you have a working Pentium II that you want to sell? So why exactly don't you want to use that one?

The OP seems to have a very rare and peculiar skill tree: he (?) is capable of programming in C and specialized in floppy compression, but has little knowledge on hardware timeline and "system initialization" i.e. assembling components into a complete system and installing OS and programs into the empty HDD/SSD of it. I bet most VOGONS users are the other way around.

dormcat wrote on 2023-06-30, 21:44:

HanSolo wrote on 2023-06-30, 19:44:

I still don't get it so please explain it to me: you are looking for a fast DOS system and you have a working Pentium II that you want to sell? So why exactly don't you want to use that one?

The OP seems to have a very rare and peculiar skill tree: he (?) is capable of programming in C and specialized in floppy compression, but has little knowledge on hardware timeline and "system initialization" i.e. assembling components into a complete system and installing OS and programs into the empty HDD/SSD of it. I bet most VOGONS users are the other way around.

Appears True that ! most of us could probably throw together any system from 286 to soc775 and beyond without issue and make it work but may not be able to code for shit 😀

Harry Potter wrote on 2023-06-30, 14:53:

I can't build a totally new system myself.

Yes you can.