Starting the 486 (continued)
About a year ago I bought a number of parts to build a 486 ("Starting the 486" was the post from mid-last year)
At the time I would only get BIOS beeps and ended up putting it all aside for a while. As I've been house bound with having the flu for the last few days, I was determined to finish it off.
Initially I bought an 8MB PCI ATI Rage XL card for it. After recently obtaining a 4MB Matrox Millenium II card, I've realised the ATI card was the culprit all this time. So the ATI card now sits in my Pentium 200 MMX box running Windows 98 quite happily. With the Matrox card, the 486 motherboard would boot up no problem.
The next problem was with the DTC I/O VLB board, or so I thought. The issues were accessing the floppy drive and hard disk. The floppy drive was an easier fix as I had it plugged in to the "B" drive instead of using the plugs after the twisted cable for "A" drive. I remember what the twisted cable was for but had totally forgotten about how important that minute detail was.
The hard disk I had connected was a 2GB Quantum Pioneer drive. The DTC card picked up the geometry okay via the BIOS, but having those details saved it wouldn't boot at all. Despite having the floppy first in the boot up sequence, I kept getting the "Invalid system disk, Replace the disk, and then press any key" and wouldn't get further. Rebooting and taking out the hard disk settings and the PC would happily boot up from a floppy disk.
I decided to added the drive as a slave on a Pentium box to see what comes of it. After adding it into the BIOS okay and rebooting it came up with the same error as on the 486. I then pulled the drive out and tested it as it was before and now had the same error with just the master drive. Booting from a floppy disk and using the sys command got it working again. I then plugged into the 486 a Maxtor 20GB drive. It's overkill, though was the only other IDE drive I had lying around. The BIOS picked it up as an 8GB drive which I suspected would be the case and could actually get to FDISK to set up a FAT partition. Using FDISK from the Win98 SE boot disk, I'm not sure why it only allowed me to go up to 504MB for the primary partition. At some stage I'll look for a drive that's more appropriate. Nevertheless it's working and for a DOS 6/Windows for Workgroups box the performance is quite nice with having the DX4 100 and 32MB RAM installed. I think the Quantum drive has had it's day.
At the time I would only get BIOS beeps and ended up putting it all aside for a while. As I've been house bound with having the flu for the last few days, I was determined to finish it off.
Initially I bought an 8MB PCI ATI Rage XL card for it. After recently obtaining a 4MB Matrox Millenium II card, I've realised the ATI card was the culprit all this time. So the ATI card now sits in my Pentium 200 MMX box running Windows 98 quite happily. With the Matrox card, the 486 motherboard would boot up no problem.
The next problem was with the DTC I/O VLB board, or so I thought. The issues were accessing the floppy drive and hard disk. The floppy drive was an easier fix as I had it plugged in to the "B" drive instead of using the plugs after the twisted cable for "A" drive. I remember what the twisted cable was for but had totally forgotten about how important that minute detail was.
The hard disk I had connected was a 2GB Quantum Pioneer drive. The DTC card picked up the geometry okay via the BIOS, but having those details saved it wouldn't boot at all. Despite having the floppy first in the boot up sequence, I kept getting the "Invalid system disk, Replace the disk, and then press any key" and wouldn't get further. Rebooting and taking out the hard disk settings and the PC would happily boot up from a floppy disk.
I decided to added the drive as a slave on a Pentium box to see what comes of it. After adding it into the BIOS okay and rebooting it came up with the same error as on the 486. I then pulled the drive out and tested it as it was before and now had the same error with just the master drive. Booting from a floppy disk and using the sys command got it working again. I then plugged into the 486 a Maxtor 20GB drive. It's overkill, though was the only other IDE drive I had lying around. The BIOS picked it up as an 8GB drive which I suspected would be the case and could actually get to FDISK to set up a FAT partition. Using FDISK from the Win98 SE boot disk, I'm not sure why it only allowed me to go up to 504MB for the primary partition. At some stage I'll look for a drive that's more appropriate. Nevertheless it's working and for a DOS 6/Windows for Workgroups box the performance is quite nice with having the DX4 100 and 32MB RAM installed. I think the Quantum drive has had it's day.
Comments
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 5172643091
It's nuts that so many of these drivers are so hard to find these days. And as I recall S3s web site used to be one of the easier ones to navigate.
That's why I think it would be great to archive more here, and they generally don't take up much space either.
I was trying to find a Crystal audio driver for NT 3.51 and found this site to get it that had a number of other drivers for AST 486s:
http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/ast486/drivers/d-video/index.htm
http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/ast486/drivers/d-other/index.htm
Thanks - what I meant was I found the driver on the links I provided. They might be useful for you and other people as there's a few for video cards and other bits and pieces.