Bill's Computer Circus
Don't get caught with your system down.
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Thursday, February 19, 2004
 

Woo hoo! The universe was good to me today. Thank you, universe!

Not only was I excused from Jury Duty, but I got one of my two dead computers back up and running. Not the web server, yet, but that's my next project.

Here's the deal. I put out a plea on Craig's List for any "scrap" motherboards that people might have and two people came through for me. I got a few more motherboards, and a ton of extra stuff, too. For free! But most of it is junk. Or, well, not very useful. Old computer stuff. But I had a good time plugging things in and seeing what worked and what didn't. I am definitely well-equipped for a computer hardware art project, now!

So, here is a picture of my computer ("Tesla") with the new motherboard in it before I had turned it on, yet. Of course, I tested the motherboard before installing it, so I knew it was at least good enough to attempt a boot-up with it.



I turned it on and, to make a long story short, I got it to boot! I have not plugged in the network or speakers, yet, to see if I have Internet connectivity or sound, but it boots. At one point it asked me to insert the Windows 98 CD to install a driver, but the driver stack didn't yet include IDE, so I was unable to read the CD. Fortunately, I was able to pull an adequate driver off a Windows 95 CAB file directory that was on the hard drive.

Hmm.. Wait a second. If IDE was not up, how did it access the hard drive? That doesn't make sense. It was looking for a PCI/IDE driver. Maybe it was for an IDE channel it found on a PCI card (I know there is one in there). Anyway, I better boot up again to see if I can access the CD-ROM drive at all.

I still have a few more tests to perform, obviously, but it looks good. I can at least put this up with a notice telling people that the web site is down when they try to access it.

Here is a series of images taken during the boot process:


Good BIOS report. I've got 128 MB of RAM in this puppy! Part of today's acquisition!


Checkdisk (scandisk?) started since I had a problem with a driver installation and had to reboot before Windows completely started.


Scandisk report - there was a bad date that I elected not to fix, hence the "Not Fixed" message in the directory structure.


And it's up! The picture is blurry, but so is the monitor, so this is a double whammy.

Once I get my web server back up, I will move the images to it and will update them to large images. Or maybe I won't - you get the idea. They're a little small to look at, and I don't have unlimited space under my Internet provider account.

Anyway, I have another motherboard that looks like it might be a good candidate to attempt a hot flash process to burn a BIOS (a GOOD BIOS) for the web server. I'm going to milk all this good fortune for what it's got. I am afraid if I wait until tomorrow to try, it will be too late. I don't often have days like this.

I'm just having too much fun! Well, I guess I'll run some final tests and plug this baby into the network and put up a "still broken" page in place of the web site.

posted by Bill  # 5:51 PM