[Coco] Cable assistance

gene heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Sat Feb 19 09:41:38 EST 2011


On Saturday, February 19, 2011 09:30:31 am Steven Hirsch did opine:

> On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, gene heskett wrote:
> > Even that is of relatively little utility since I built this machine
> > several years ago, as this $300 ASUS motherboard has an FDC that
> > cannot deal with 256 byte sector disk formats regardless of what I
> > tell it with setfdparm. (linux of course)
> 
> Gene,
> 
> You may want to keep your eyes open for an ancient ISA-bus motherboard
> that can boot Ye Olde version of Linux or MS-DOS.  I keep an early 90s
> Dell 486 around solely for the purpose of reading/writing floppy media.
> It's fitted with a Compaticard IV that can talk to 3.5, 5 and 8" floppy
> drives.  Install the free uSoft TCP/IP stack and a junk-box ISA ethernet
> adapter and you have the perfect "shop" machine.
> 
> It can also dual-boot (using LILO, remember that?) to Linux
> 2.0.something.
> 
> I dislike running anything with the uSoft name on it, but for utility
> purposes it's too handy to pass up.
> 
> Steve

I have such a box, has RH7.3 on it IIRC.  But getting to it to hook up a 
monitor and keyboard & mouse, all ps2 stuff as its USB is only partially 
usable, and that only after it is booted.  I need to clear it out from 
under the old desk and maybe put that mobo in a smaller box.  That one is 
an industrial sized steel tower about 32" tall & weighs about 30 pounds 
empty.  It has a 450 mhz K6-II in it and 384 megs of ram.  A monster, in 
its day. :)  Hasn't been powered up since I put DD-WRT on a similar but 
much smaller box, using it for a router.  Up till then, it was my 
firewall/gateway machine.  A whopping big 42 gig hard drive.  This box has 
4 terrabyte drives in it.

I have got to clean house in my man cave.  Just as soon as I find a good 
pattern to carve me and few friends on this list, a batch of round tuit's.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
<http://tinyurl.com/ddg5bz>
Laughing at you is like drop-kicking a wounded humming bird.



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