First post, by starhawk
I have a lady friend. I am trying to do the usual thing that nerds do for their lady friends... impress her with my computer skills. In this case, she has a very old promotional game CD from Coca-Cola that ONLY runs on Windows 98, and because I tend to tinker with them incessantly, I have a fat stack of "thin client" type computers that can be handily converted to low-power desktops.
Well, usually.
In this case, the patient in question is a 10ZiG RBT-616V aka Dell FX-170 aka about six hundred others you've never heard of... OK, it's actually a Clientron U800 with a different logo, because that's what Clientron does -- they make half-decent hardware and then rebadge it for other companies.
The Clientron U800, by any other name, is about the size of an old internal floppy drive, or two USB floppy drives, stacked, with the tails cut off. It sports an Atom N270, i945-variant chipset, and just enough room for a laptop RAM stick (DDR2 SODIMM) and a flash "Disk-on-Module", which in this case has been substituted with a CompactFlash-interface "MicroDrive" (an 8gb mechanical hard drive in a CompactFlash Type II card form factor) in a tiny IDE adapter that is fitted to a very short cable so that it can sit transversely. The heatsink in this thing is so big that I actually had to cut it down slightly (it hasn't noticed) to fit the card and adapter.
The U800 additionally has a surprising bevy of ports for its size. The front boasts two audio ports (speakers/headphones and microphone) and two USB 2.0 ports. The rear has the 12v power in, a PS/2 keyboard port that is ONLY for keyboards, a DVI port that can take a "just wires" style VGA adapter for analog output, two more USB 2.0 ports, and an Ethernet port. While WiFi cards are available for this system, special ones in fact (they run off a weird internal USB connector), this particular example does not have one... which is just fine.
You can tell I'm a hardware guy, right...? 😉
I've installed FreeDOS and gotten USB mouse and CD support up and running, which is nice. I've thrown a few DOS games in, which is also nice. But I can't get Win98SE to install. (I need SE for the USB support for the CD drive. This machine has neither COM nor LPT ports. I don't have an LPT CD-ROM drive any more anyways...)
Alas, every time I start setup, I get this little gem:
...which gives me a headache and indigestion and makes me want to go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
More annoyingly, on this particular version of setup, I can't make the /nf switch work, which, per ComputerHope, is supposed to disable that misfeature. IT GETS IGNORED.
I've spent HOURS Googling this nonsense and gotten absolutely nothing and nowhere. Help me, Vogons[dot]org Community, you're my only (remaining) hope...