luckybob wrote on 2023-09-15, 22:35:

Yup. I do this as default for windows 95/98. Just a basic fat32 should work. Worst case, a 2nd hard drive.

How do I do it without an IDE to USB connector (I don't have one) to connect to my main PC?

EDIT: I *am* however, able to install FreeDOS. It's the only OS I can seem to install from USB, though it takes forever to do so.
EDIT 2: ...nevermind, FreeDOS's installer errors out while copying the kernel files.

Is there some sort of live cd where I can create and format partitions ala gparted, but also flash them with iso images contained within the livecd or something?
I'm curious.

Instead of trying to flash the iso onto a partition (I've never heard of anyone doing that) why not copy the contents of the iso file? Dead simple to do. Winrar and later versions of Windows make that a simple task.

debs3759 wrote on 2023-09-15, 23:31:

Instead of trying to flash the iso onto a partition (I've never heard of anyone doing that) why not copy the contents of the iso file? Dead simple to do. Winrar and later versions of Windows make that a simple task.

So how would I do that?
Would it be:
-Open up Gparted live from a usb flash drive (gparted live is known to work from usb completely for some reason)
-Insert another flashdrive, but one flashed with the Windows XP iso
-Format and partition the hard drive
-Copy the windows xp setup files to the hard drive?
But how would I boot from the hard drive then?

This should sound familiar to many of you. I decided to test out the P3 system I bought a couple of weeks ago. I started by deciding which video card to use, and went with my Quadro 2 Pro. Since it had an empty optical drive bay, I filled it with a locking hard drive swap tray. Put in an old thirty gigabyte IDE drive, and off I went. But the Windows 98 installation kept erroring and stopping. So I removed and reinserted the RAM and the Slot 1 CPU. Still having errors, so I took out one of the two 256 meg sticks of PC133. I hit the jackpot because everything went smoothly after that (and when I tried it again, it immediately had an error, so definitely bad RAM).

No sound out of the Creative CT1740, and it had an error in Device Manager. I couldn't find a resource conflict so I uninstalled it in Device Manager and rebooted, but the same thing happened again. It came with a modem and a network card, and neither of them had drivers installed. I'm not going to use the modem, and I probably won't use the NIC, so I pulled both of those and then the sound card worked. I then tested it out with the installed P3, then I swapped in a Socket 370 P3 1000 (this board has both the socket and a slot) and benched it again. It is working very nicely.

The first test was before I installed the chipset drivers, and everything in the CMOS setting was at default.

It has a Creative Waveblaster; I got my first computer in late 2000, and I never played DOS games - what game(s) should I try out to test out this MIDI?

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-15, 23:34:

So how would I do that? Would it be: -Open up Gparted live from a usb flash drive (gparted live is known to work from usb comple […]
Show full quote

debs3759 wrote on 2023-09-15, 23:31:

Instead of trying to flash the iso onto a partition (I've never heard of anyone doing that) why not copy the contents of the iso file? Dead simple to do. Winrar and later versions of Windows make that a simple task.

So how would I do that?
Would it be:
-Open up Gparted live from a usb flash drive (gparted live is known to work from usb completely for some reason)
-Insert another flashdrive, but one flashed with the Windows XP iso
-Format and partition the hard drive
-Copy the windows xp setup files to the hard drive?
But how would I boot from the hard drive then?

The usual way to do it would be to put the drive as a slave in a system that has an OS on it, then create a partition at the end of the drive that you extract the files to. Then, in your case, boot from a floppy and run setup from the partition you copied the files to. I'm afraid I can't give more detail than that as it's been a long time since I had to do it. I've had optical drives on every system I built/used since 28 years ago. That getting harder as time passes, du to most modern cases not having optical drive bays.

Not terribly exciting in the grand scheme of things, but, to show that I'm true to my word, I've been applying the advice/learning from the Compaq and dead motherboard threads. Thought I would investigate a faulty PSU and found some decidedly dead capacitors. I have some on the way, and looking forward to finding out if this fixes the PSU, which will be handy for bench testing things. Also, if this works, I'll then check out an old Samsung LCD monitor which I only stopped using because it seemed to develop some intermittent power issue - maybe bad caps on the internal PSU, I'll check it out later.
Pics of the dead caps from the desktop PSU I dug out
Other things I'm learning - I need a higher wattage soldering iron, and, perhaps a hot air reworking tool. Just need to make sure I get one that's good enough without going totally overboard.

Got 95 to install on my laptop's 540MiB HDD (painful). Going to source some parts to make the other one running again and 32MB RAM cards since 16MB ain't enough.

debs3759 wrote on 2023-09-16, 00:49:

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-15, 23:34:

So how would I do that? Would it be: -Open up Gparted live from a usb flash drive (gparted live is known to work from usb comple […]
Show full quote

debs3759 wrote on 2023-09-15, 23:31:

Instead of trying to flash the iso onto a partition (I've never heard of anyone doing that) why not copy the contents of the iso file? Dead simple to do. Winrar and later versions of Windows make that a simple task.

So how would I do that?
Would it be:
-Open up Gparted live from a usb flash drive (gparted live is known to work from usb completely for some reason)
-Insert another flashdrive, but one flashed with the Windows XP iso
-Format and partition the hard drive
-Copy the windows xp setup files to the hard drive?
But how would I boot from the hard drive then?

The usual way to do it would be to put the drive as a slave in a system that has an OS on it, then create a partition at the end of the drive that you extract the files to. Then, in your case, boot from a floppy and run setup from the partition you copied the files to. I'm afraid I can't give more detail than that as it's been a long time since I had to do it. I've had optical drives on every system I built/used since 28 years ago. That getting harder as time passes, du to most modern cases not having optical drive bays.

I don't have a floppy drive or any blank floppies.

More sun brighting experiments.

I cant wait to show you the results of the other stuff that is already brighting for 2 days.

After the first day of sun bathing each part gets cleaned and a technical check.
A lot of the cd drives i put in stograge because they didnt work anymore.
So i decided to give them another chance and while cleaning and greasing the drives i fiddled with the pots near the lasers.
And all drives started working again. Only really tiny adjustments were needed.
Some drives dont like burned cds (they probably didnt like burned cds when they were new) , but all of them play audio cds and read a full cd to disk.

Here are some pots for your viewing pleasure (took the photos as reference for how much i turned the pots) 😁

Later i will post some results of the parts that are now being sun bathed.

Today I ordered a PCMCIA CF Card Reader to use on a Texas Travelmate 4000m. Got absolutely no idea how easy it will be to set up!! Currently I don't have a working hard drive on the laptop so am only able to boot via floppy.

ldare1000 wrote on 2023-09-17, 12:00:

Today I ordered a PCMCIA CF Card Reader to use on a Texas Travelmate 4000m. Got absolutely no idea how easy it will be to set up!! Currently I don't have a working hard drive on the laptop so am only able to boot via floppy.

I wish you luck with that 😀 Hopefully the boot disk I shared in the thread could work with just the socket services changed to match your laptop's PCMCIA chipset.

I had the 3d scanner out again and have been doing some 'probably pointless, but interesting' stuff with a couple of old Acer laptops. I've had a Travelmate 8000 sitting in a box for the last 15 years which was missing some keys and didn't have the screen - it's got an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 and a 1400x1050 screen so I thought it was worth putting back together to see how it performs. In conclusion it's basically a Pentium M (fast P3) with graphics equivalent to a Radeon 9600 / 9600XT.
To put it back together I bought a Travelmate 800 because it had the screen and it shares the same keyboard - there are no Travelmate 800 (mobility radeon 9000) /6000 (intel gma) / 8000 parts or parts available for sale, but there was this complete Travelmate 800 that had some water damage, it was cheap so worth using for parts. When testing it, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 it has is sort of equivalent to a Geforce 3.

The Travelmate 8000 now has the good keyboard and screen and it's complete now, hooray! But the Travelmate 800 still works well as a half-top and it now had the missing keys keyboard. I had to 3d scan something else so it's best to do these things as a batch since the scanning setup is a pain to get set up, so I scanned the two missing keys and tried printing them on my FDM 3d printer - note that this is the absolute limit of what I think FDM 3d printing can do, even with a 0.25mm nozzle the results are pretty rough. However that didn't work, the 3d scans of such small objects aren't high resolution enough to make things like the little keyboard clips work so the key just falls off.

I figured out that instead of spending an eternity trying to get the 3d scan converted into a CAD workable format, I could just use prusaslicer's "add part" and "add negative volume" to add in the necessary shapes and dimensions to make the clips work again, just adjusting things by eye based off the scan data:

With that adjustment the keys now clip on and stay on - I've done similar with some libretto keyboard keys that I melted but those were made using measurements in CAD and it was before I had the scanner setup I have now, that took longer. This was comparatively quick 😁

Hi, Thanks for replying. I've seen a screen shot of your post, do you have to know roughly what page its on there are now 1200+ pages. I'd like to try your bootable disk as a starting point please.

Any idea how I can find out what PCMCIA Chipset I might have? Are there thousands or just a few that manufacturers shared?

Nice 3D work there!!

I've tried searching the words and phrases the screenshot I have of your

post but can't find it?

ldare1000 wrote on 2023-09-17, 14:38:

Hi, Thanks for replying. I've seen a screen shot of your post, do you have to know roughly what page its on there are now 1200+ […]
Show full quote

Hi, Thanks for replying. I've seen a screen shot of your post, do you have to know roughly what page its on there are now 1200+ pages. I'd like to try your bootable disk as a starting point please.

Any idea how I can find out what PCMCIA Chipset I might have? Are there thousands or just a few that manufacturers shared?

Nice 3D work there!!

I've tried searching the words and phrases the screenshot I have of yourFB_IMG_1694710619928.jpg post but can't find it?

Click on the "Your Posts" button in the top right to see which threads you've posted in, should be this one: PCMCIA CF Cards on an old 486 Laptop
To find out which chipset you've got, you can look at the drivers it has or use a utility called "tellme.com" (attached) in a DOS prompt and it should say which one you have. There's only a few manufacturers.

Cleaned up the flea market OGXbox I got today. Recapped, redid the gid-awful Aladdin XT install it had. Pretty proud of how it looks now conpared to before.

Before:

After:

Also, unfortunately didn't take pics of, but managed to get off the heatsink to repaste off my V3 3000 16MB AGP.
Zippo fluid, a thin college access card and patience is all it took. Card still works and runs much cooler now 😀

Ordered some 4700uF 16V caps. When they came in, the brand was known: Changxin. Never heard of it.
So I got my Uni-T UT601 tester and give it a go on all 10. The average capacitance measured was about 4250uF, the baddest was 4120uF.

Am I missing something or what? I'm thinking of sending them back and get some Panasonic or Würth caps. They are three times more expensive, but I think it was a wise lesson.

4120 is wthin tolerance spec. What you need to measure is ESR.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-15, 08:15:

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-11, 13:35:

I was amazed that it really works...

2023-09-15 09.47.59.jpg
First batch done. Still not perfect but WAAAY better then before.

just wondered what kind of voodoo you are doing here putting all your retro hardware an the windowsill. Worried you are throwing these out. But after catching up and you older posts I am relieved and amused 😁
I unfortunately(?) have no old yellowed hardware at the moment. But if I ever have I will try that if good old elbow grease and baking soda does not do the job.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-04, 22:23:

Does anybody know where i can get the plastic casing around the power switch? It seems to be a 1:1 clone of the IBM XT/AT powersupply.
I would even get it 3D printed if there are files available...
The switch is working, just the black plastic frame is broken.

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-09-05, 07:21:

There's a 3D model of such a bezel for printing on Thingiverse.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-05, 10:21:

Awesome! Thanks a lot... I had not used the right keywords for my search.. Thanks again.

I know from my 3D printer that prints are ... ok... not the best but ok...
Now i recieved these...

Who has allowed that 3D printing gets this good?
They look like orginal parts, even with a slight structure like the original.
Thats AMAZING! Seriously AMAZING!

Next i will paint them black and fill in the white lettering.

May the AST shine in its former glory again...

That looks fantastic, what service did you use? At the industrial scale, 3d printing with fancy machines makes a lot of sense 😀
Should be really strong as well, that's nylon isn't it?