Reviving this thread to say that I'm going through the same emotional roller coaster ride at the moment. I decided some time back that I needed a DOS machine so I can use ImageDisk, 22Disk etc and generate some diskettes for some of my CP/M and early DOS collection. I pulled out an old ECS P4 motherboard (purchased from Fry's decades ago) I had stored and discovered why I scrapped it in the first place. Bulged cap's all over the place. So either recap or start over. Decided to start over since I wanted to use several 5.25" drives plus a 3.5" and the TexElec quad-flop card needed ISA slot which the ECS mobo did not have. Picked up an auction site motherboard with ISA's and installed the QuadFlop board. Every 5.25" drive I tried to use was reported to fail. With either the QuadFlop or the onboard disk controller that seemed to support two floppy drives. Many tries and no progress. Figured my stash of dirves were all untested and so could be all crap. So I went off and started to build a floppy tester that a person on the S100computers site designed. Then got the bug to just get'er done and picked up a second motherboard This one booted my DOS 6.22 floppy disk and formatted drive B: which was one of my 1.2MB 5.25's. Copied DOS to the 5.25". Progress. Pulled up the old bulletproof Antec tower I planed on using to house the system and crude, it doesn't have standoff locations for a Baby AT motherboard. So pull out a seoond tower, same thing. Pulled out a working tower that I use for some other stuff and it has the standoff locations, but I have to remove the motherboard in it and mount this new motherboard. What the heck, its progress. Right? So next, dig out a PATA IDE hard drive. Smallest one I could find was 40GB and I attempted to install DOS onto it. DOS said no go. Bong, the bell went off - maybe it needs to be less than 32GB for this early setup. Now what? Found a 16GB CF card and a CF to PATA IDE adapter card that fixs the CF card out through one of the tower's card slot opening. Great. Oh, crude, I need a 4 pin floppy/CD type connector to supply power, but all my 4pin to molex adapter cables are female Molex and I need a male to plug into the power supply cables. Forget that adapter and dig some more. Okay, I dig out a 2.5" IDE to 3.5" adapter that needs a female Molex for power so the power supply issue is solved. Added a 2.5" laptop to CF adapter card with the 16GB CF card and I had a booting system with DOS 6.22 on the hard drive. Works for now, clean up the mess when I get the rest working. Turned to adding a CD drive to the IDE cable and no boot. Oh, snap! Old brain cells kicked in and I rememberd all about Master/Slave on IDE stuff. Moved the jumper to Slave on the CD drive and booted. But the CD drive was fubar even after I told DOS to start with CD-ROM support. I had already wondered about how I was going to use one cable for the hard drive and the CD-ROM drive when the two were no where near each other in the tower case. Thought maybe I'll move the CD drive to a second IDE cable and the second IDE connector and see if that solves both the issue of it reporting to be dead and also the mounting problem of needing a very long cable to reach both devices. Dug deep into the old parts bin and found two more cables, both have pin 20 blocked, but the motherobard's connectors have all 40 pins and so no go. Got to break a pin or drill out the connector's blank. Put that aside and moved onto the next issue. Started to look for my box of Windows 98 and ME CD's and it has gone MIA. Spent way too much time looking for them. It was now nearng mid-night and I decided to call it a night and think about it some more. Haven't even attempted to get the QuadFlop floppy controller card working. Haven't even thought about adding a 360K 5.25" drive. I unremmebered so manay things about DOS and PATA IDE that my brain hurts. Figure I'll spend the next day or two looking for my Windows CD's. Maybe when I fond them I'll be willing to pick up where I left off.
texelec.com
