Long one this and about as frustrating as anything I've ever done!
One of mates dropped off and old stack that he no longer used, he thought the memory was dodgy and knew it would take longer to fix than the cost of just buying a new one.
Being a bit of a geek he only had Fedora 6 loaded on, though it wouldn't boot, he reckoned because of the memory problems..
Ok so I've got copies of 98 and XP on an external HD and bought a linux mag with the latest issue of fedora on...
Computer won't boot, just sits there looking at me. Rebuild it carefully, it only recognises half the memory but eventually success. Upgrade the Fedora installation, no probs.
Couldn't boot from USB so I need to burn a disk... Pooter boots very occasionally and crashes 5 times during burning of xp disk. Odd. Took it apart reseating memory very carefully and it boots fine everytime.. Until I plug the rewriter and CD back in... Starts playing silly buggers again...
Rebuild system again sans DVDs and look in the boot logfile... Hundreds of processor interupts which shouldn't be there... Wtf is going on thinks I? The CPU fan is ancient and naff so I replace it, no difference... Buy a new secondhand CPU, no difference.... Memory now checks fine every time....
Rip out the graphcs and audio cards and system seems to work fine, burn windows CDs for XP and 98(just in case) and try to boot from CD. XP falls over, out of memory.... Good job I've got the 98 CD burned so try to run installation. 98 does exactly the same.... 512 meg system and 98 setup is OOM?????
Has to be a virtual memory problem so I figure I need a dos partition on there. No floppy in stack and I don't have a dos floppy anyway....
Back to Fedora and after only 2 hours of looking through man pages I find a utility which allows me to change the filesystem to dos. I do that, XP setup still moans so try 98. Marvellous idea, seems to be working..... except that it insists on formatting the HD. Not a problem except that 98 is more used to being run on 40meg hds, not 160 gig ones... 2 hours in and 7% complete... Bugger.
So need to create a small dos partition... Means loading Fedora on again, oh well it only takes about an hour. Create partition and load 98 on the system. Right, time to load XP on from my external HD, no problem just need to load USB drivers on. Small cd with drivers on won't work, too scratched after years of disuse > library > burn CD with drivers on.
External HD up and running so load XP in.... just need the code which I have stored in my online........ email account. Ouch, only got a wireless network, and no drivers for a wifi card are likely to work on 98 anyway. Fedora wouldn't detect the wifi card at all.... Get code from library computer access and replace Fedora partition with NTFS. All seems fine but..... Xp doesn't recognise my wifi card. Check wifi card for manufacturer. Solid stainless box covers the pcb so no clue as to what it is... Ouch. Can't even try a generic driver as can't get on t'internet without said driver for wifi card.
Phone mate, neither of us thinks we can ID the card under windows. Oh thinks I, Unix has pciconfig which will tell me what it is..... Would be great if I still had Unix on the system.... Reload Fedora onto the machine, which happily decides that it will wipe the drive of any other filesystems...
Go out and get exceptionally drunk very early in the day. Attempt not to kick said machine as I stumble in later.
Find type of wifi card under Fedora > library > burn Cd with drivers > create small partition > 98 setup > USB drivers > Win XP > load Wifi drivers > internet access! Success!
So I blissfully re-install audio and graphics cards, along with the extra CD drive that I'd left out and even go as far as putting the case back on. I should have known better. . Pooter refuses to boot, doesn't even get as far as the memory test. It sits there, looking at me and refusing to do a sodding thing.
Soooo.... There was another problem.. I sorted it but can you guess what it is yet?
