IBM PC 300GL PII 300 XP problem

[Guest]

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

 

[jlanka]

how about just booting off a DOS floppy, creating and formatting a FAT32 partition, then running winnt.exe in the i386 directory? Also remember to load smartdrv.exe off the DOS boot. Just another alternative (the way I do NT installs)

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Guest]

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

 

[jlanka]

yes it works for XP/2K/NT (which as you know already are all the same basic OS). Along the same lines, the standard NT admin trick was to copy the i386 directory onto the hard drive which gave you all the files needed for future driver installs, etc. without needing the CD anymore.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Guest]

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