As of now I have a computer that I got for 1 penny at an auction of my grandma's house. It has no manuals or disks with it and has a completely blank hard drive. I'm not that experienced with computers but I'm willing to put in alot of time to learn, so far I have figured out:

Compaq Desktop pro XL 450
511 mb hard drive (using a win 95 boot floppy)
24 mb of ram (about)
(I wrote the tech support on the web site with the serial number I found on the side 3 days ago but nothing has happend)

AND THATS IT

By doing some research online I have gotten to the point where I can start up the red hat 7.2 installation program using the CD and Floppy images off of redhat.com and I'm all the way to a list of 5 CD drivers (I'm guessing they are the defaults) and none of them work, and I don't have any disks or information on where to get the drivers for the CD-rom that I have, does anyone have any ideas on what to do or where to find this information. Also, how do I install MS-DOS 6.22, I thought that would make things alittle easier... but maybe I'm wrong... thanks for the help, I really want to get started on this!

Mark

sounds to me your going to have to open up the case to find out what kind of cdrom it is and any manufacturer information on it, serial number.. etc. You should be able to install DOS the same as any other OS, just boot to the disk and install from there.

if you do open the box, write down the serial numbers on the different things inside. then head over to the FCC website. you can enter the serial numbers there and it will tell you the full name of the device. its very useful for finding out about esoteric hardware.

Alex

P.S. i think that the address is fcc.gov

I looked up the FCC ID numbers on everything that I could find inside the computer, and took all the drives and boards out and put them back in and when I started it up again (I am still using a "Startup Disk" that I was prompted to make during setup, if I don't have the startup disk in A: when I start the computer it gives me a "non-system or disk error" message, even thought there is no disk in) with the boot disk I got from bootdisk.com (not to be confused with the startup disk) something new happend.. this error came up:

CD-ROM Device Driver for IDE (Four Channels Supported)
(c) Copyright Oak Technology Inc. 1993-1996
Driver version :V340
Driver Name :BANANA
No Drivers found, aborting installation

Device Driver not found: 'BANANA'.
No valid CD-ROM device drivers selected.

So that was a new error after I put everything back together, I think something wasn't put together right before... is there really a driver called BANANA???

Also now when I use the startup disk to get into dos before it gets to the A:\ but after it says "Starting MS-DOS" it says:
The current date is SUN 11-11-01**
Enter new date (mm-dd-yyyy) : (I press enter)
The current time is 2:55:43:72a**
Enter the new time: (I press enter)

**Both the time and date were correct even the first time it happend, so something must still be working from before they erased it

Does anyone know how to get rid of that, or why it is happening??? It happends every time.

But anyway...in the MSD.exe program on the startup disk it gave me the following information... I couldn't find anyhting useful out of it but then again I don't know what I'm talking about... also some of it is information from the FCC ID #'s:
Computer name: Compaq
BIOS Manufactorer: Compaq
BIOS Version: (this was blank)
BIOS ID bytes: FC 01 00
BIOS date: 01/20/95
Processor: 486DX2/50 (this is correct, I matched the FCC ID number and replacement part # on the compaq web site)
Math Processor: Internal
Keyboard: Enhanced
Bus type: EISA
DMA controller: yes
Cascaded IRQ2: yes
BIOS data segment: 9FC0 1k
Conventional Memory:
Total:639k
Available: 568k
Extended memory total: 15360k
XMS (what is XMS)
XMS version: 3.0
Driver version: 3.1
A20 Address line:not enabled
High memory area: available
Available SXMS and Largest Free Block:15296k

Stuff I got from the FCC:

Video Card (I'm not sure if thats the right name for it)FCC ID; CNT-75MXZ21: PCI Local Bus VGA Card; maximum res.1280*1024;non-interlaced

CD-ROM FCC ID; IUO-9TB012CRB: (I got this from the manufactor's (Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries Ltd.) website www.mke.panasonic.co.jp/en/download/download.htm)
2x speed tray loading SCSI Model: CR-503b, and I got the drivers (version 2.1) for it off the web site I just gave you but I have no idea what to do with them because I still can't get the hard drive to show up... it spins up though... so I know it works. I noticed it has NO jumpers on it... is that possibly the reason? Also there are no partitions at all on whatever fdisk checked... I guess it was the floppy drive, but I'm guessing if there were any small information holding partitions that they got deleted in the cleaning proces of the computer...

Processor Board FCC ID; CNT-75MXZ25: 486DX2/50

Modem FCC ID; CJE-0297: Internal FAX/Modem Card
Manufactorer: U.S. Robotics Corporation Model: 000276
I found some drivers here http://www.usr.com/support/drivers-t...p?prod=s-modem but I don't know if they will work or not because my product number isn't found there, but there is a generic driver for all pre 1996 models

So basically I need to figure out what to do with those drivers for the CD-ROM and Modem that I found (if they are the right ones) and get the hard drive to work... I don't know much about jumpers...wow... that was alot of stuff... but with what I know so far am I still good for Red Hat 7.2?????? If anyone can help me with any of that stuff I would greatly appreciate it.


Mark

exented memory (or xms) is one of the types of memory that dos handles. the other is expanded. they were invented to get past the problem in the old days where the CPU could only directly address a small amount of the memory (upto a megabyte). if you added more memory then it became known to dos as expanded or extended memory.

linux doesn't refer to it as either of these but if there is an option in the bios (which i doubt) then you want it set to extended memory

as for the componants you may want to check out this site linux hardware database . you can search for the hardware there and it might give you some nice info on them and how to get it to work. Alternativly, try searching in google for it. you might come across other databases or archives relating to the hardware.

you might also want to try this site intel motherboard bioses

it might spout some info that you could use.

as for red hat, you may be able to get it onto this machine if you opt for the console install. you'll also have to be sparing with the packages you install. what are you going to use it for?

if its for learning then you might want to give slackware a try or debian. they install better on older hardware though they do have rather archane install programs.

was this sputed by a micro$oft startup disk? this driver looks like the generic atapi cd driver that windows ships with for use in dos command mode. since this is an old drive i think that the driver might be slightly dodgy anyway. this may not be the case, that's just what i think on the matter. the linux driver should work since linux drivers for old hardware tend to still be in the kernel and the generic ATAPI CDROM drivers work for pretty much anything.

the battery on the motherboard is either loose or dead, try replacing it.
(either that or it's having trouble dealing with the millenium bug?)



Alex

P.S. hope that helps a bit

Re: boot disk & date:

There's nothing wrong with the RTC or battery (otherwise it would report 00:00:35.75(ish) 01-01-80 at each boot).

The time/date dialog is there because there is no AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS on the bootdisk, just a boot sector, MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS. To get rid of it (without an editor) try:

A:\> copy con autoexec.bat
@echo off
[^F6][RETURN]

1 file(s) copied
A:\> copy con config.sys
files=30
buffers=30
[^F6][RETURN]

this will give you non-null, but inconsequential files.

PS. why are you asking about MS-DOZE - penguin power!!

I was asking about MS DOZE because I can't figure out how to get the CD-ROM to read my installation CD... any suggestions?

You said that you got drivers for a MKE CR-503b 2X CD-ROM. Unless I am mixing up the model numbers (it has been a while), this CD-ROM is neither SCSI nor IDE. MKE (Panasonic) made proprietary drives about this time (up to 4X, I think). If this drive is what I think it is, it will have a 40-pin connector and an ID number selector jumper (0-3) on the back. In order to use this drive, you must have a proprietary controller (they were usually on sound card) controller configured and the drive plugged into it. In my experience, it is generally not worth the hassle - also, if you do not have the controller, they are getting harder to find (with drivers, at least).