Pretty self explaning subject. Im bored during the winter usually so I want to get my old AST 486 up and running. The hard drive is shot I think, its a 200mb anyways. I got it maxed the frig out with a pentium overdrive 32mb of ram and a whole 1mb of on mobo video ram, had to buy some weird 512k video chip a while back, pretty crazy eh? I got all this stuff a while back and did it all but now its not booting on account of the HD. I got a pci ethernet card so I though it'd be interesting to get it online and stuff. I have a formated 1.2gb drive that Im gonna swap into it the only problem is Ive never done something like that before. Will it boot to like a command promt or can I start it up with a windows disc in the cd drive or something like that? Could I make it into some sort of rudementary linux box even? Just wondering, I like to have winter projects
If the drive is formatted and you haven't put anything on it the machine will just boot to a screen saying it can't find the operating system most likely. To install Windows on it you'll probably need to make a boot disk, becuase most machines don't boot from the CD-ROM drive, only floppy and hard disk. As for Linux, you'll need to do the same thing. An older distro should work fine, something like Debian stable (codename woody). I have that on my Pentium I 100 MHz @ 133 MHz with 48MB RAM. It should work on any 386 or higher with atleast 16MB RAM, though it'll be console only.
ah, didn't think of the boot disk. i can just get a win95 one off of line im pretty sure. no time today but i have tomorrow off. whats a matter oldengineer? i just wanted to get it running cuz its right behind the comp im on right now sitting there all sad and stuff. the thing is maxed out and runs win95 pretty good, not to mention quake. ast i no defunct im pretty sure, gone the way of crappier packard bell :smt043. i dont think im ready to run linux on there then, just a thought thats all
Basiclinux is pretty impressing, it was made especially for old pcs (your will run it fine) and use only 5mb of space on the hdd. there's also NASlite, another linux distro., it runs of a single floppy disk and can turn an old pc into a file server and you can web browse as well, from what i heard. i never tested them, only but heard about , so i can't comment. good luck! PS: Never tried snowboarding? :smt043
so if i wanted, cahaz, i could just boot them off of the floppy to check out the program or what? just looked it up real quick online but didn't read it all yet. i got win95 and i have 98se already just they'll take up a lot of the hd, i got the 200mb one working now, dont feel like taking the case off tonight, i can run two drives though so could i boot an OS off one or the other? yah i live about 15 minutes from a good sized skiing mountain, just its so expensive, i'd love to snowboard though, me and the girlie might check it out soon, she already knows how to. and me, well i got some skate/longboarding skill so i dunno, might pick it up quick. i just wanted to fix the ast up it was looking sad :smt082. i guess i get bored of games sometimes, i just replaced a bunch of dash lights in my car yesterday for a project.
i never tried them, so i can't actually say how it works, sorry. there's some liveCD dristributions who start right from the cdrom drive, without any installation and it works really fine ( it's slower than a normal distro. but eh, nothing can be perfect!) all you need is a pc that can boot from the cdrom drive, =are you able of this? another good thing from a liveCD distro is that you already have plenty of program right out of the cd, without installing anything. take knoppixlinux by exemple, the ver. 3.6 had something around 2gb of programs, drivers, ... on a 700mb cd! (i don't think you'll be able to run knoppixlinux on your machine though.) Basiclinux needs to be installed, if i remember well. but NASlite works straigth out of the floppy drive, but remember: this one is really basic and not necesary the best thing for you. i'll search the web for more info, stay tunned! :smt023 -----edit----- oh! almost forgot, if you have any gmail account or invites, this is difinitivly a link you should check: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html + 2 gb for you. (linux only!) :smt045 [subliminal message: /on] linux is fun... linux is virus free*.... linux is stable.... linux isn't shit..... linux is your friend... as well as tux...... try linux! [subliminal message: /off] j/k :smt043 cahaz PS: i don't really enjoy winter either, i always try to find something to do, some projects, like trying to do a portable NES (incomplete) and trying to make a US ff 2 and 3 on nes. i never was able to finish those either, but one day i will. :smt045
everything is hooked up correctly? maybe this message can be seen simply because there's no OS installed, you know how strange (and anti-user friendly) old hardware can be.
yah i went through and rehooked everything. there isn't a thing on that drive so that might be the problem. either way thats the story of my life, go to fix something and break it hehe :smt043 im much to frustrated now to bother, it wont use the win95 boot disk now so i dunno, im off for the night
muahahaha, my girlie is sleeping so i gave it one more go and blamo, we're good. i got a 98se boot disk off of line. only thing is it says i dont have a fat or fat32 partition or some junk? can't i just install without partitioning the drive? edit: ok i guess i cant do it that way "cannot create a temporary directory. if you have HPFS or NTFS installed on your hard drive, you will need to create an MS-DOS boot partition to set up Windows" when i booted up with the floppy it said it installed the hard drive utilities to c: but i've never done a partition so now im stuck again, gotta use fdisk and format right? i cant figure it out and can't find anything online to help, argh, goodnite
Use fdisk (should be on the boot disc) to create a partition. Or get partitionmagic and do it that way.
yah i figured it out late last night, it had some sorda partition in it already so i head to delete it and repartition it. either way all i could find was win98se which chugs along very slowly on that rig. i used to have a 95 disk which ran pretty good on it but can't locate it now. either way this thread didn't even really needed to be started i guess, i figured most of it out myself, but thanks for the help
joeseff i am thinking of reviving a corpse of a pentium 75 so i know how it is with those lovely old computers
Same for me, I have some nostalgia for the 486 era was that was when I started, and my own PC remained to be a 486 (be it a cranked up one with 120mhz overdrive, 3 HDs and at one point even a Voodoo) up to 1999 when I could buy a Pentium 133 off a friend... those were the days, mocking the system requirements like that South Park FPS that required a 266mhz P2 according to the box but ran smooth on my P133 :smt043
I had a 386 up until 1999! Beat that! 80MB hard drive, 5.25" *and* 3.5" floppy drive, 4MB RAM, Windows 3.11, only got a sound card in '95, and no CD-ROMs for me! Old PCs are fun, especially when they're free! I got a free Gateway 486 recently, bought a Pentium Overdrive 83MHz for a wallet-exploding £1.50, stuck in a spare 24x CD-ROM drive (it works, somehow, even though the BIOS doesn't support it :smt023), 24MB RAM, a 2GB HDD and Win95, and now I have something that can actually play MP3s in Winamp, without having to put it in mono or half-quality! I was thinking of using it as a firewall, but that wouldn't be any fun! I've got loads of old games that are too much hassle to get working properly in Win2k, and some like Descent which barely worked on my 386. And if I make a network in my house, I'll be able to play MP3s (stored on the PC downstairs with actual SPACE) in my bedroom with the 486!
