Recently I have just started to build a new computer system for use at home, I used to have a battered old 486dx2 66 pc, and I decided to sell it off as a bad job when I started working in tech support. Basically I couldnt get used to the slow speed of the computer and the rather quaint process of dialling into the internet.
Anyway when I decided to start building a page or two to post here I thought I may as well drag together all the spare pc parts dotted around my family and see what I could put together. After grabbing a motherboard, processor, hard drive and monitor from my brother and my old case, floppy drive, memory etc. I thought here we go piece of cake.
Now bear in mind I have put systems together for years and am no stranger to the odd head scratching session. I know what the problem is and have managed to sort it out but I felt I was banging my head against a silicon wall.
My brother had previously used the hard drive as a slave and had changed the jumper settings, or to be exact had thrown them all away. So I finally work out which jumper designates master or slave and sort that out. I then have to work out which jumper designates C: or D: drive, I finally work that out.
All this time I am using by old mother board as the new one has PCI slots and not VLB so I cannot use my old graphics adapter or my old VLB enhanced IO card. I had to pinch one of my dads sim savers to change four 1mb 30pin Simms to 1 4mb 72pin SIMM. So I check the mother board and IO is built in I think great. All i need to do know is buy a PCI graphics card and that is on order now.
When I sold my old system I got rid of 99.9% of my disks and I find that I haven't kept any operating system disks other than an old MSDOS 4.1 install disk. Great I can at least load an OS. Wrong. This disk goes through the install and then needs another disk to make the drive bootable! So still no OS installed. Get my dads Win95 disk and thats a companion disk. No way to install the OS from that. Plus the fact that my cd rom drive has packed in. My brothers is an upgrade disk so I cannot use that as I haven't got any Windows installed. I know make a recovery disk in windows and use that. Still cannot boot from C:.
I installed my hard drive as a second drive in my sisters boyfriends machine which I was in the process of fixing and cannot copy windows over due to his corrupt registry and system files. I am really banging my head against a brick wall now.
I gave up on the idea of transfering files from his system and am currently waiting on a work mate to bring in his old MSDOS 6.2 disks so I can at least get a system up and running before doing all the twidly bits like upgrading to windows and loading editors and graphics files etc.
Well never mind I will get there soon and will then be able to get a lot more of the development work done to get this site up to scratch.Not this time.....
Then the nightmare begins...