Hello All!

Here is the elongated version of my problems last Saturday.

I shut down the system at about 9am on Saturday, in order for the curtains
to be installed, and I decided to buy whatever components I could.  I
quickly rang up some prices, and Acuma (opposite Hecto) had the best prices
for everything. I thought I could learn a lot about the different
components if I touched them myself, instead of watching other people
magically install them.  I was right. I also thought that not a lot could
go wrong, and I could revert to my old machine anyway.  I was wrong.

I have an ISA system, and I want to go VLBus.  My brother-in-law was to get
my ISA system.  However, I didn't want to spend a fortune giving him a
computer, I was only going to give him what he was prepared to buy himself
anyway.  Which was a 486SX33, 4 meg memory, 170 meg hard disk. Now because
I already had 24 meg, I was going to give him 4 meg of that (which, BTW,
turned out to be 80ns memory, and the stuff I have left for myself is
70ns).  He would get my old MB, but I would take the 486DX33 out of it, for
my motherboard, and he gets the new 486SX33.  He was also going to get the
new hard disk, until I found that it only cost $5 more to go from 170 meg
to 200 meg.

It was very difficult to get the CPU out of the motherboard, but Brenton
told me the secret (take the motherboard out of the machine, and use a
flat-head screwdriver and twist it).  They fitted the new CPU at the shop.
When I assembled the new PC, I put the IDE floppy and hard drive connectors
in the wrong way.  This actually caused the master boot record of my hard
disk to be corrupted, but I didn't know that, all I knew was that the
system was coming up with "unable to boot", and after various
stuffing around, it came up with "unable to find rom basic" or
something similar.

Neither of which was particularly useful to me.  Anyway, I tried putting in
my old IDE controller instead of the VLBus one.  Actually I tried many
combinations of the two controller cards, and the two floppies, and the old
controller card with the old floppy driver worked.  I had an MSDOS boot
disk. I could actually access both my hard disks!  I tried "sys
c:" without success. Once that was done, I tried putting the new
floppy drive in its place, and ended up destroying the master boot record
on that too (the floppy wasn't write protected).  However, I didn't know
that, and many combinations later and I still hadn't got the rotten thing
working again.  BTW, all the while, trying to get these plugs out is
incredibly difficult, and I've got enough cuts to prove it!  There's still
blood on my IDE cable!

Anyway, I needed to find out whether the motherboard, the IDE controller
card, or the floppy disk was bust, and I couldn't.  I decided to call it a
day, and go back to my old system (actually, by this time it was Sunday,
and yes, I did go to sleep in between - totally fucked).  I even bent one
of my 486DX33 pins trying to put it back into the old MB.  :-(  Fortunately
it doesn't seem to have caused any grief!  Then I found that my floppy and
hard disk still wouldn't boot.  That was when Rod called to find out where
the mail was (this was about 11AM).  I must have been on the phone for 4
minutes flat, and in that time I had given him the symptoms, he'd diagnosed
it, correctly, to need an "fdisk /mbr".  Luckily I ended up
finding another DOS boot disk, so was able to do it.  I ended up getting
DOS up and running, but I needed OS/2 up to get the BBS going.  I only had
4 meg in this machine now!  OS/2 wouldn't boot off my SCSI drive in 4 meg,
and I figured it was as much work to go back to VLBus as it was to move the
RAM.  Within an hour or two I managed to piece my system together, one
component at a time.

In the end, I announced the BBS availablity, when all the components were
still outside the case, isolated by plastic, their own mounting, or a
hanky! On Monday at 8pm or something, I put the stuff back in its case.

The following things remain to be done:

1. LED to read 33 instead of 999
2. Hard disk light to go on, hopefully for SCSI.
3. Longer cable, or I'll need to move the floppy disks down, as the thing is
   stretched to the limit, preventing further boards from going in.
4. New Maxtor drive to replace Conner
5. Adaptec 2842VL to replace 1542C
6. Reset button to be connected
7. Figure out what ROM BIOS shadowing is all about, to know whether to do it.
8. Get rid of that 1 wait state?
9. Assembler my brother-in-law's computer.
10. Buy a 486SX-33 CPU, and Adaptec 2842VL.
11. Sell my 1542C.

The total exercise bill is going to come to a bit over $2000, and the best
part of it is that $1600 of it doesn't come out of my yearly computer budget
set by my wife!  Which means another hard disk may be on the cards!  And it's
badly needed, let me assure you.  I'm currently running with 34 meg free on
D, 48 meg on E, and 48 meg on F.

If Rod would become a point, I'd get rid of all message areas I'm not
personally interested in, and everything else would be pass-through.  So
how about it Rod?  BFN.

Paul

--- GoldED/2 2.42.G1114