project box. codename: "operation *** boat"

in computer tech class, i just found a spare motherboard lying around and decided to build something out of it. it's an old server board running dual SEC slots for pentium II or pentium III processors, 4 DIMM slots supporting up to 1 GB SDRAM. it has 3 SCSI channels, 2 IDE channels and 1 FDD channel. no integrated video, no integrated sound, no integrated network. all it has as far as I/O goes is keyboard and mouse ps/2 ports, 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 serial comm ports and 1 parallel printer port.

the current setup is like this:
dual pentium II at 400 MHz each,
512 MB SDRAM
18 GB, 7200 RPM SCSI hard drive,
300 watt fortron power supply,
16 MB nvidia TNT2 video on AGP 2x interface,
cheap 16-bit sound card,
10/100 network card.

that's the setup. all out of parts around that tech room.
if the BIOS has any overclocking features, i'll probably try overclocking it.

it's in the middle of a winXP pro install right now.
so once i get everything running i'll report as to how it's going. and i might even post some pictures, just for the hell of it.

i had a computer set up in the back of the tech room for me and a few of my friends to use. that one was a 500 MHz pentium III (if we can find another pentium III of the same speed, we'll be putting those in the dually) with 384 MB SDRAM. it eventually was affectionately nick-named "the assboat." now i'm using the RAM from the OG assboat and building the "assboat 2."

i'll get some pictures of both setups and post them later on.

great name! better license plate

haha. thanks. so we have some problems so far.

after booting from the xp pro cd and letting the operating system install, i came back to find it in an endless loop of restarts. is there anything special i should know about SMP or SCSI?

i wanna see a picture!

i'll get one if i can somehow make that thing work. basically it copies the windows installation files to the SCSI drive, and then tries to reboot for the install. when it tries to do that, it goes into an endless cycle of restarts.

seriously, is there something different about SCSI? i've got one SCSI drive plugged into the primary SCSI channel, with a DVD-ROM plugged into the primary IDE channel and then the standard floppy. so that's my drive configuration on it. the boot order is currently floppy, CD, SCSI. i'm not sure what the problem could be, since like i said; i've never used SCSI before.

Did you specify RAID drivers at the beginning of the setup? You need to have the drivers for the SCSI controller on a floppy, and specify to use them at the beginning of the Windows installation. I dont know if this is your problem, but its worth a shot.

yeah well i definitely don't have any drivers.

i'll look on the board and find out what kind of SCSI controller chip it's using, then try to find drivers on the internet.

look in the bios the info might be there so you don't need to rip her(BOATS ALWAYS FEMININE) apart.

yeah. BIOS had the info. we've obtained drivers and i'm about to walk across the hall and start the OS install with SCSI drivers. so hopefully it works this time.

ok so just to give a little update, we've had lots to do in tech class recently, so i haven't been able to do much work on the assboat.

as soon as i have time though, i've located two 500 MHz pentium III chips, so i'll be putting those in, and i'll also need to get the SCSI drivers loaded in so i can do an OS install. once that's finished though, i can give you some performance results. no benchies, but i'll compare it to my system at home.

i wanna see a picture!

One more suggestion, I am also not totally familiar with scsi, but one thing I have been told to do was to make it boot from the scsi once the OS had started to install.
Swap your boot order around and put the scsi first.
Ok, just so I make sure I am making sense here...
First boot, leave it as is, floppy-CD-scsi. Then when its installing windows it will want to reboot, as it is, switch it to scsi-whatever-whatever.
Heard that could help too.

eyah. i still need to get the drivers and whatnot. we had them but i lost the disk

but hey! our beloved assboat has been upgraded! we now have a geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB on AGP 4x, and dual pentium III chips at 500 MHz each.

soon as i can borrow a digicam from a friend, i'll bring it to school and take pictures.

I dont know squat about your hardware, but i know it doesn't need scsi drivers...
you were able to install windows right? you wouldn't have been able to partition and install without windows seeing your drive w/standard drivers. Check the bios boot options again maybe?

no i didn't get an OS installed. it had windows ME small business or some crap like that on it. and i need an admin password that i don't have. so i can't use it how it is. i need to format and reinstall the OS, but i can't because it recognizes the drive in BIOS (SCSI chip can run on a base level), but then when it formats and copies files it tries to boot from the hard drive. when it does that it can't because the drive is trying to operate on a level above BIOS. that's when it needs the drivers for the chip.

i need to do some more work on it, but there's never any time.

I may be wrong, but i think the fact you were able to format and copy files at all means that the drive is able to operate at a level above BIOS. Windows asks you to press F6 to install drivers _before_ you get the option to partition, right? this means it wants the drivers for the partition, file-copy procedure and all. It sees your drive in the install program (which is actually a cut-down version of the whole OS booting from CD...) so it must have the drivers.
If u want to use your old ME setup boot from an MSDOS floppy and grab all the .pwl files and crack them, or just delete them.

I wanna see this system work i just built something similar out of ebay parts cept i got P3s - i've had all sorts of problems with the thing

hahaha. yeah. i upgraded it to pentium IIIs. but still can't get the OS to boot. it was a box that was donated by some business people, so i have no idea how to use ME or anything on its dos level. i'm thinking that win98 runs on the same dos code... in which case i'll be able to use a win98 boot disk, eh?

(we have 98 boot disks out the *** hole)

yea, windows ME is msdos with pictures so a 98 boot disk is fine, or anything else that can read FAT32.

that's what it thought. as soon as i have the time i'll get to working on it.

and one of my friends was supposed to take some pictures of it. i wonder if he remembered to do that

Why put XP on it? Why not like 98SE or even 2KPro or an older version of linux?