[retronet] Hi. I'm new here.

[Jason Stevens]

Some IDE drives have jumpers to reduce capacity, ususally to 6GB which older controllers will cap at the older limit of 500(512?) MB.

I’d probably recommend some kind of IDE to flash device.  Not only are mechanical drives prone to failure, they are also SLOW…

From: Wossen Wyatt via retronet<mailto:retronet at mailman.chivanet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 11:33 AM
To: Jason Stevens<mailto:jason.r.stevens at live.com>
Cc: Wossen Wyatt<mailto:wossen.wyatt at wossman.net>; Grant Taylor<mailto:gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net>
Subject: Re: [retronet] Hi. I'm new here.

(Whoops. Missed this one.)

The multibooting I was talking about was on the Win 3.1 PC, not the Suns. At
least not the Ultra45.

I'm still finding nuggets of info one youtube video at a time for getting
old stuff to work. Like I just learned recently that OpenStep won't book
from a hard disk larger than 2 gigs. That explains why all my VM installs
have failed on first boot after setup. I thought a 4 gig drive would be
small enough, but it wasn't. And the boot error didn't give any hint at what
might be the problem.

The smallest IDE drive I have is 40 gigs and I'm skeptical of buying truly
small drives on ebay since they'd be so old. But I found this little gem
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001JTO782/) that will let me easily swap CF
cards through the rear of a PCI slot bracket and those come in suitably
small sizes so as soon as I get one imported I'm off to the races. (I live
in Guyana, South America, btw, so sourcing hardware is tougher than it
should be.)

I'll post pics and maybe video of some of this stuff in due time. Especially
MAE if I get it to work. :-)

Ciao,
W.

-----Original Message-----
From: retronet
<retronet-bounces+wossen.wyatt=wossman.net at mailman.chivanet.org> On Behalf
Of Grant Taylor via retronet
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 11:14 PM
To: Wossen Wyatt <wossen.wyatt at wossman.net>
Cc: Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net>
Subject: Re: [retronet] Hi. I'm new here.

On 4/8/19 8:43 PM, Wossen Wyatt via retronet wrote:
> Hi Folks.

Hi,

> I'm new here.

Welcome.

> I stumbled across the Datashed while googling Sun stuff and I'm quite
> impressed.

Yep, John has some nice equipment.

> I've recently acquired a Sun Ultra 45 and a Sun Fire v40z and I'm
> looking for interesting things to do with them and a community to
> share it with.
>
> I also have an oldnforce-based Sempron system that i run Windows 3.1
> on (It's the only desktop system I have with IDE and floppy support on
> the
> mobo) and I'm planning to try OS/2 and OpenStep on it. Hopefully I can
> get them all to multi-boot.

Multibooting the Suns will be a neat trick.  In at least that I don't know
how to go about it.  I guess you can boot off of different disks.  ;-)

If you're new to OS/2, I'd recommend 4 or 4.5 as they are most likely to
work on non-ancient (more ancient than you have) hardware.  There are also
some updated boot disks online that have different drivers and other
modifications to work with newer equipment.  My biggest problem was with
OS/2 not liking my hard drives.  I think they were too big for the boot disk
from IBM to work with.  (Hence the updates.)

If you don't have the boot disks (just a CD / ISO), you can extract images
off of the CD.

OS/2 has it's own boot manager that is designed to allow multiple operating
systems (from the mid to late '90s) boot from it.  It will play nicer with
others.  The same can't be said about Windows 9x.
MS-DOS & Windows 3.x will likely be okay.  Windows NT 4 should be okay too.
I remember it being a game of what to install in what order to be able to
get all the OSs on the system without stomping on each others boot loader.

There is also the possibility of a boot manager like System Commander.
(That's what I used in the late '90s.)  I think some version of PowerQuest's
Partition Magic also had Boot Magic.  They helped.  I know that System
Commander had something to prepare the machine for the new OS.  It would
sort of temporarily hide the existing OS(s) from the OS that you were
installing so that it couldn't mess things up (as easily).

There was an art to it.  But it was fun.  And multi-booting multiple OSs
from the '90s will get techies from the time to raise an eyebrow.  How high
is dependent on the number of OSs and complexity.  }:-)

I've not personally messed with OpenStep.  So I can't comment about that.

> Is this list still active?

Yes.  Well, it's been idle as we've been busy with other things life has
thrown out.

Again, welcome.  I look forward to reading about your progress, and trials
and tribulations.  :-)



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
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