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One more point - when installing the OS only have the disc you are installing it onto connected. This completely removes the possibility of doing something to the wrong disc (I once accidentally formatted 1TB of video and had to send the disc to the manufacturers to get it back)
Those are good points. Right now my 40GB is a standby drive with the original installation still on it. If I completely lose it and toss the 750GB out the window, I can always stick that back in and go back to Windows 2000 as it was before.
I thought about an external USB drive, but access speeds are much slower considering it only has USB 1.0.
USB 2.0 Controller card, $15.
Having said that, your probably right about that issue, the card wont help that much because of the slow PCI bus.
P.S. Big up the Windows 2000 Crew! The best operating system Microsoft have ever made - unless you count W3.1
I remember when I was first ordering that machine from Dell. I had the choice of putting Windows XP or 2000 on it. XP was still relatively new and I didn’t trust it one bit, sort of like Vista now.
I thought about getting a USB 2.0 port added on, but yeah, PCI would be a bottleneck.
Windows 3.1? Umm no thanks. Heh, that thing was more like a shell on top of DOS. I remember all the fiddling with IRQ ports and whatnot just to get a sound card to work with a particular game.
Yes but you have to admit that it worked properly. And it forced people to learn something about the computer they were using in order to use it.
Honestly, these kids these days with their XP’s and their Vista’s, and their Wizards, they don’t know they’re born…
P.S. I forgot to say before, Kudos on the mega cheap HDD, the cheapest IDE 750GB I can find in the UK is like twice the price!
Yes that is totally true. I learned quite alot about the inner workings of PCs thanks to PC gaming in the 90s.
Again, at work so no time to express my full thoughts but:
1) For massive data storage options that are much more flexible, check out Windows Home Server - there is a free 3 month trial of it to play with. It does a few other neat things as well but the main feature I like is the Dynamic Storage Array. This behaves on the surface kind of like RAID, but has two main advantages; You don’t have to mirror all your data, you can select certain folders; and you do not have to use twinned discs or even discs of the same size. It does require a dedicated machine to run it though, so it may not be the solution for you right now.
2) Use USB/1394 discs instead of internal ones. This means you can have more discs, swap/upgrade them more easily, and they won’t screw with the boot order or other BIOS related problems.
3) If you can find the binaries for BIOS A02 somewhere, you should be able to downgrade again. You might have to do this manually using a DOS. If this is the case use freeDOS, its much easier than anything else.
4) Cable Select is much simpler than it sounds when you look it up online. Master and Slave settings force the drive to be the one you set it to. If you set your drives to Cable Select, the Master/Slave relationship is defined by which interface on the cable you connect it to. Think of these three settings as dynamic (CS) vs. static (MA/SL).
5) Drive letter assignments are a tricky business. The key point to remember is that it doesn’t really matter in any way what letter you give a volume, as long as you know what you have allocated. I find it easier to keep C as my system disc, but thats just because it’s what i’m used to. You can use anything you like - if not C I usually use X, but again it’s a question of what your used to. The only letter you should never use (although I’m not sure how you would do it anyway) is A, as that is reserved within Windows for FDD’s.
6) (Probably the most important point) Use one of your original drives (I recommend the 40GB) as your system disc. The reason for this is twofold.
- massive discs have (more) massive read/write times. Your OS will not run (quite) as smoothly from the largest disc
- If your OS dies for any reason, it means you can just disconnect your data disc and put it in another machine with no loss of data. How annoying would it be to have to format your OS disc and lose a load of media in the process?
DaveRandom | 07.02.2008 | 6:44 AM