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Antec computer.

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facattack

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This mysterious computer has a custom case. I am very certain it has a SCSI 5.25 drive. The computer doesn't recognize the IDE drives.

there's two blue connectors in the mother board which I think are IDE. There's also a black connector. Could that be IDE and the blue connector something else?

The BIOS identifies "Energy Star" and... I should write this stuff down when I power it up. It could very well state the computer's model when I boot her up.

What's a trick to identify a mother board?

Ah. And it seems to have 4 PCI slots plus one PCI Express X16 plus one PC express X2... at least that's what I think the slots are...
 
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The trick to identifying a motherboard is to look for a model number silkscreened somewhere on the PCB and Google it. Failing that, go onto TULARC, select the appropriate category, and scroll through comparing CPU/FPU/battery/SIMM socket layouts until you find a close match. (Don't laugh, it's how I identified my 386 board.)
 
If you can take a picture, that could help. See enough boards and one quickly identifies it. I though Antec made cases not whole systems so it will be which ever motherboard that got tossed in.

Motherboard might have SCSI connectors on the motherboard. Count the pins: 34 = floppy; 40 = IDE; 50, 68, or 80 = SCSI.
Some chipsets had IDE connectors that would not work with ATA/IDE hard disks but will work with ATAPI/IDE CD-ROMs. I have one. It's annoying.

Your slots are likely to be AGP and that weird modem riser slot. But could be other things too.
 
The plot thickens. I put an IDE cable into the machine having not understood that the floppy cable was entirely SCSI. Plug it
into the hard drive and everything works to a point.

It boots to "Windows XP ULTIMATE EDITION by Johnny."

My friend's name appears as the login and it asks for a password I do not know.

It seems that not only did he have a custom case but whoever built it for him (if he didn't build it for himself....) made up a custom OS. That explains no code on the case for recovery of the OS.

EDIT: It seems the only things I really needed to do were put a graphics card in the machine since it lacked one and put in a working IDE cable. I thought this whole setup would be more complicated. The onboard video output plug was causing me confusion as it had a male-out VGA setup.

Up next is a Sylvania mini computer of some sort.... a 7" laptop running Windows CE. No programs, but it has a SD card slot. My experience with Windows CE is limited. I guess I'll see if I can get a version of Movie Maker on it plus a browser.... sighs...


See the attached image to see what one of the floppy outputs looks like.
 

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SCSI floppy drives are extremely rare, especially the 5¼" size. If the AK47 board is what you really have, there's no SCSI onboard. A SCSI cable would be 50 pins at a minimum--what I see is a 34-pin floppy cable header.

If you can boot from a Linux Live CD, you can get around the password issue.

I've never heard of Windows XP Ultimate--Pro and Server, but I thought "Ultimate" came in with Windows 7.
 
facattack said:
Ah... so I don't know the diff between a floppy and a SCSI connector. :(



How do I do that? I have an ubuntu disk but want to keep the custom OS.
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google is your friend. search windows password recovery. there are quite a few freebie ISO out there that can overwrite (yes, overwrite, not override) the administrator password.
 
Ugh. Spend the whole day on-location. The Antec got the "Blue Screen of Death." What kinda RAM does this motherboard support??

I had several old 128 MB RAM stick sitting around plus some 258 MB ones. Only one of the 258s seemed to fit on this one or HP I was fixing, though.
 
Looks like a normal VIA KT133, I've owned a few... beware that if you put a soundblaster live or newer in it with ACPI turned on, you'll get horrible crackling whenever the bus goes idle in windows. You have to turn it off and manually assign all your IRQ's with a lot of sound cards.

facattack said:
I am very certain it has a SCSI 5.25 drive.
Click to expand...
Standard floppy -- 5.25" drives use the edge card connector, universally. Only on 3.5's did they go to pin connectors, which is why most cables from about '84 to '98 included both since the wiring is the same. Your picture is quite clearly a normal floppy connector for a 5.25".

facattack said:
there's two blue connectors in the mother board which I think are IDE.
Click to expand...
Correct.

facattack said:
There's also a black connector.
Click to expand...
Floppy connector. Notice it's shorter. IDE is 40 pin, floppy is 34.

If you are having trouble with it seeing drives, are you using the right cables? Are you trying to use 40 wire or 80 wire? They both use 40 pin connectors, but the 80 wire cable has cable select -- If 40 wire, are you setting the drive select jumpers correctly for 'master' or 'single' instead of the modern 'select'?

facattack said:
Ah. And it seems to have 4 PCI slots plus one PCI Express X16 plus one PC express X2... at least that's what I think the slots are...
Click to expand...
Nope... not even close. 5 PCI, one ISA, 1 AGP (which is what you should be using for video), and one... gah, I forget what they're even called -- nobody used them since nobody actually made cards for it other than dialup adapters... that's right, it's an 'AMR' slot. Most listings say it only has 4 PCI because if you plug in a ISA card, it's backplane occupies the same slot as the PCI next to it (since they face opposite directions).

facattack said:
WOWZA!!! $35 for a single 256 MB. I hope the one I was trying to put in there was like this.
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Try these guys, they're my go-to for old RAM...
http://myworld.ebay.com/1-800-4-memory

Specifically:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/256MB-SDRAM-MEMORY-RAM-PC133-NON-ECC-NON-REG-DIMM-/330518040550

I recently picked up 256 megs of 72 pin EDO off them for $20 -- and that ten bucks for 256 megs of PC133 is an entirely reasonable price. They'll even sell you a gig for what crucial asks for 256.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1GB-2X512MB-SDRAM-MEMORY-RAM-PC133-ECC-6NS-REG-DIMM-/230650344427

facattack said:
I put an IDE cable into the machine having not understood that the floppy cable was entirely SCSI.
Click to expand...
I suspect you really don't know what SCSI is...

facattack said:
The onboard video output plug was causing me confusion as it had a male-out VGA setup.
Click to expand...
There is no on-board video plug -- where you trying to plug it into the 9 pin serial port, or the 15 pin joystick/midi port?
 
Damn! I sound just as stupid talking computers here as Peggy does in King of the Hill talking about speaking Spanish!

I wrecked a CD-ROM drive because it somehow ate my CD-ROM. (Instead of being flat, I had it turned at 45 degree angle and the CD-ROM went inside of the drive. After taking apart the drive.... forcefully... I found that the laser had burned into the CD-ROM making it useless.)

I'm working on a HP Pavilion 6535 which only has one 5.25 slot and two 3.5s. I have a 5.25 floppy drive in the slot and the cover's off of the machine so I can jerry rig the CD-ROM to the connectors. It doesn't recognize my USB floppy (can't figure out why the small power plug won't hook up to the floppy's connectors. I might have to take the zip drive out and swap it with a different internal one I have lying around.
 
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