First post, by RJRC
Hello there.
I decided to take the plunge and get a retro build put together because my work was chucking out a beautiful old beige box and I wanted to rescue it from the skip. I am fairly new to retro PC-ing; my previous retro systems have all been Atari STE varieties. Turned out to be a Celeron SL633 with a bulgy-capped board that didn't work. In fact every part other than the case and the power supply and the stick of RAM was broken, so I got the bits together and assembled my machine. I'm going for a sort of Christmas 1997 build, though at that time I had a 200MMX with no 3D graphics card.
- Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard
- Pentium II 300MHz (I plan to do the overclocking with sliver of tape business later on)
- 128 MB RAM, single stick PC133
- ATI Rage 128 graphics card
- Soundblaster AWE64 (assuming one comes up at a worthwhile price)
- Startech IDE to CompactFlash card (8GB).
I had to replace the floppy drive and optical drive. The former would read disks occasionally then thrash and pack up, the latter was totally gummed up and the motor was burnt out. And couldn't be recognised half the time. Then again, it was literally from a skip so I'm not too surprised.
Eventually once the replacement drives are in place, I find my old Windows 95 install floppy and burn a Win95 OSR2 install CD. It doesn't work because the Win95 boot floppy HAS NO CDROM DRIVER ON IT. I copy across a driver from a DOS boot disk I have that does work, rename it to sample.sys like it is in the config.sys, put in the appropriate MSCDEX call in autoexec.bat, and it now recognises as drive D.
I reboot. It recognises all the drive and the CF card and loads d:\win95\setup.exe just fine. I get to the ersatz Win 3.1 looking install screen. It partitions the CF card successfully and formats it but only to 478 MB for reasons I can't fathom. It tells me "Setup is now preparing the install wizard" with the progress bar. As soon as that gets to 100 percent, I get an error:
"WINSETUP has performed a Segment Load error at (address)"
I continue that and get "SETUP has performed a General Protection Fault at (address)"
Bombs to text mode and tells me to remove all floppy disks and hit key to reboot.
I tried a Win98 install CD as well. This gives me the same error at roughly the same point but from SUWIN rather than WINSETUP. And bombs likewise.
I did some looking around and I find out that faulty RAM may be to blame. I don't see how, the RAM recognises just fine every time at post. I still get a fresh stick and put that in. Same errors.
I am absolutely stuck. Does anyone know why it won't work? It will install and run DOS just fine, and run programs in DOS, but not Windows 95 or 98. Is there any way I can get around this? Is there not, say, a pre-installed Win95 partition anywhere that I can just save out to my CF card with a card reader? Also why won't any fdisk.exe I have let me have more than 478 megabytes on said card even though it's an 8 GB card? Am I just wasting my time?
Incidentally, I have no way of saving new floppy images. I have one of the USB floppy drives on my modern PC and no other systems to do that with. Those USB floppies are worse than useless. They corrupt everything they touch, honestly.