IBM PC 300GL PII 300 XP problem

Greetings gurus,

I purchased an IBM PC 300GL through a Classifieds on another board. It was "bare-bones", lacking memory, drives, expansion cards, etc.

It has the Slot 1 CPU, a single integrated IDE Controller & Floppy Controller. I installed 256mb of RAM (2x 128mb), a 20gb 5400 RPM Maxtor HD & a 24X CD-ROM I had available. I installed a floppy drive & NIC.

When I booted up the first time, I entered the "Configuration/Setup Utility" & noticed that the 20gb Maxtor drive had been detected as "IDE Hard Disk Drive 2 & the CD-ROM was detected as slave on the secondary channel. I used the Maxtor diagnostic utility & it sees the Maxtor HD as being master on the "SECONDARY CHANNEL" & the CD-ROM as the slave on the secondary channel. MicroScope sees it the same way.

This is very confusing as there is only 1 IDE channel integrated on the system board & I do not have an IDE controller card in the system. I want to install Windows XP Pro & use this as a file server. As this system does not seem to support booting from a bootable CD, I am using the 6 disk XP floppy boot set. It made it through disk one, but gave an error on disk 2 ("File .\NTkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 7, Setup cannot continue).

It seems the Windows 2000 floppy installation set is working (It's formatting the drive now, but I have to go to work, so I want to post this)

I would REALLY appreciate any pointers on this!

Dave

System Support Analyst, IT

I've not tried that. I appreciate the tip though! That will come in handy in the future for sure. You could convert to NTFS after installation.

Hmmmm.... I wonder if this works for XP?

I think I'll try it tonight after work.

Dave

System Support Analyst, IT

Yep, I always copy the i386 folder to the HD & change the setup path in the Registry to C:\i386. But I had not tried that tip about booting form a DOS floppy. Nice tip!

System Support Analyst, IT