Will USB work on a WinFWG 3.11 PC?

[JorgeA]

I think those HDDs must be so near the end of their lifes that I'd rather not mess with them. I've got a 1275 MB Seagate Medalist ST31277A sitting on a shelf because I consider it too old and too little to do anything with it (it was produced in the 49th week of 1997). I've just bought 3 used HDDs, one 20 GB, one 30 GB and one 40 GB for US$ 10 the lot. The 20 GB HDD died in 3 days of testing but the other two survided and are now in use. Except for the time and patience invested, they cost me very little and are much bigger than your HDDs. I'd go for a 20 or 30 GB HDD, if I were you. Then I'd clone the partition of the 1 GB disk into it as one of its partitions and still have plenty space for three more. Then again, only you can decide whether this would be worth the effort. Of course, if you can get PLoP to work, all I said above cannot beat using PLoP with no hardware changes at all.

dencorso,

The 1GB drive is the original, factory-installed drive. The second drive was one that I purchased from a surplus store last year.

Just to illustrate how ancient the BIOS is, that second HDD is actually a 4GB monster that I had to fiddle with extensively because the BIOS won't use more than 2GB.

And what I mean by that is that it won't use more than 2GB at all -- and not that it won't use more than 2GB "at a time"! It took me and RLoew two weeks to finally get it running -- and even then we were never able to get the BIOS to make use of the other 2GB, partitioned/formatted or not. So if I were to buy a 10GB drive, in practice I'd still have a 2GB drive.

Fortunately, both SpinRite and SCANDISK/CHKDSK give these two drives a clean bill of health.

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

jaclaz,

These "instructions" you link to (and those ARE the ones I was referring to) say ONLY how to create the floppy disk image -- not HOW to actually use the program afterward. So I create the image, and then what?!

The scope should be clear:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#intro'>http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#intro

The Plop Boot Manager is a small program to boot different operating systems. The boot manager has a builtin ide cdrom and usb driver to access those hardware without the help/need of a bios. You can boot the operating systems from harddisk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. You can start the boot manager from floppy, CD, network and there are many more ways to start the boot manager. You can install the boot manager on your harddisk. There is no extra partition required for the boot manager.

You try booting from it (rest assured that it is very unlike that your PC will explode or catch fire by doing this).

If you are lucky, you will see something very similar to:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#screenshots'>http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#screenshots

If you see the "USB" line and you can select it by using the arrow keys and pressing Enter, compare with keys available:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#bootmanager'>http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#bootmanager

Whether this will produce the desired effect (booting from the USB connected hard disk) or not is the scope of the test.

You may notice how both the above links (as well as the one I previously posted) all bring you to the same page:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

The whole page (as I see it) represents "the instructions" but you are right there isn't actually a line saying:

If you choose the USB entry in the menu by highlighting it using the arrow up and down key, then press ENTER PLoP will attempt booting from USB.

Probably since it is a boot-manager and most keybard driven bootmanagers use this same paradigm (highlight choice by selecting it with arrows keys then press ENTER) this part was omitted.

BTW, you are perfectly free to ignore my posts, should you not appreciate my words.

Whatever you choose to do, have fun while doing it .

jaclaz

P.S.: At my local chess club, at least when I was a kid, there was not an instruction sheet with this piece of info:

How to move a chess piece:

1. grasp piece with your fingers (you can use either of your left or right hand), NOT your feet.
   
2. hold it, firmly. FIrmly. ^[1]
   
3. move it across the checkboard hovering a few millimeters above it's surface in a gliding like movement until you reach the destination
   
4. only some movements are allowed, depending on the piece that you chose to move, thus you need to verify the destination with Rules before you iintiate the move
   
5. when moving the knight, since it is possible that another piece is in the way, you need to LIFT the knight enough to avoid knocking over such other piece(s)
   
6. when you finished moving the piece to the destination, let it go and remove your hand and arm from over the checkboard
   

maybe that is the reason why I never learned to play that game decently and took on reading sci-fi instead.

^[1] but not too firmly. Compare with Susan Calvin in Risk! - Isaac Asimov's "Rest of the robots" 1955:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(Asimov)

[JorgeA]

P.S.: At my local chess club, at least when I was a kid, there was not an instruction sheet with this piece of info:

How to move a chess piece:

1. grasp piece with your fingers (you can use either of your left or right hand), NOT your feet.
   
2. hold it, firmly. FIrmly. ^[1]
   
3. move it across the checkboard hovering a few millimeters above it's surface in a gliding like movement until you reach the destination
   
4. only some movements are allowed, depending on the piece that you chose to move, thus you need to verify the destination with Rules before you iintiate the move
   
5. when moving the knight, since it is possible that another piece is in the way, you need to LIFT the knight enough to avoid knocking over such other piece(s)
   
6. when you finished moving the piece to the destination, let it go and remove your hand and arm from over the checkboard
   

maybe that is the reason why I never learned to play that game decently and took on reading sci-fi instead.

jaclaz,

These sorts of fundamental things are easily picked up by watching how other players do it.

For less-obvious knowledge (such as the proper procedure for offering a draw, or the correct way to castle), we simply inform the person: "OK, you castled by moving the rook first and then the king. I want to let you know that you're supposed to do it the other way -- move the king over two squares first, and only then the rook. If you're in a tournament and you try to castle by moving the rook first, your opponent could obligate you to move the rook only and leave the king on its starting square, because he could claim that that looks like simply a rook move." I've lost track of the number of diffferent people I've explained this to, but I keep doing it because I realize that it's not self-evident.

In the case of using PLoP, even if there were a computer club nearby, it's not very likely that a newcomer could happen to observe the veterans setting up and then loading PLoP, so that he could watch and learn how it's done. This sort of knowledge belongs in the less-obvious category, which requires explanation.

Thank you for providing it.

I'll give it a try and see what happens.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

If you are lucky, you will see something very similar to:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#screenshots

jaclaz

jaclaz,

Well, I guess that I am not so lucky.

I downloaded the PLoP ZIP file and the RawWriteWin.exe program, extracted the IMG file, inserted a blank (and pre-formatted) 1.44MB floppy in A:, launched RawWriteWin in Windows 98, entered the path and name for the file to be written to the A: drive, and... I keep getting an error message that says, "LoadLibrary16 failed!" Whatever the **** that means.

Better success was to be had with the DISKIMG.COM program working in a DOS box. I created the image and booted the old PC with this floppy in it, and I got the first screen. When I selected USB (other options included the two HDDs), there was a sequence of messages saying:

LOADING EHCI DRIVER

SEARCHING ON HOSTS

DRIVER REMOVED

LOADING UHCI DRIVER

SEARCHING ON HOSTS

DRIVER REMOVED

LOADING OHCI DRIVER

SEARCHING ON HOSTS

DRIVER REMOVED

Then there was a very faint (black letters on a dark blue background) message saying,

BOOT ERROR

NO BOOT DEVICE FOUND, PLEASE RETRY IT

I do have a USB stick in the port, but of course there's no OS on it -- I'm trying to activate USB precisely in order to put an OS on a stick.

Still, does the first sequence of messages mean that it DID detect the USB card, or not really? Never used this program before, so I don' t know if the drivers were "removed" because they're supposed to be removed, or because it didn't find a USB device.

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

It didn't find any USB devices... I think your add-on board is toast, or badly seated, or the PCI slot is toast, or turned off in the BIOS. Can you perhaps test the board on another PC? And BTW, you may be destroying the USB memory area by allocating an UMB over it with EMM386.EXE... are you? Also BTW, which IRQ did you give to the PCI bus? 11 is the best shot.

[jaclaz]

I do have a USB stick in the port, but of course there's no OS on it -- I'm trying to activate USB precisely in order to put an OS on a stick.

Still, does the first sequence of messages mean that it DID detect the USB card, or not really? Never used this program before, so I don' t know if the drivers were "removed" because they're supposed to be removed, or because it didn't find a USB device.

It doesn't sound "good", but definitely PLoP when used like this is looking for a bootable device, so you should have one connected to the USB port in order to make sure that the failure is actually a failure.

You do have another PC, haven't you?

Run on it RMPREPUSB:

http://sites.google.com/site/rmprepusb/

and make the USB stick bootable (it doesn't actually matter what it boots, all we need to know is that PLoP can detect it and go anywhere beyond "NO BOOT DEVICE FOUND, PLEASE RETRY IT", even if it stops with another error it would mean that it detects the thingy.

In RMPREPUSB, you want to tick the "Boot as HDD (C: 2PTNS)"

jaclaz

[jds]

Just to illustrate how ancient the BIOS is, that second HDD is actually a 4GB monster that I had to fiddle with extensively because the BIOS won't use more than 2GB.

And what I mean by that is that it won't use more than 2GB at all -- and not that it won't use more than 2GB "at a time"! It took me and RLoew two weeks to finally get it running -- and even then we were never able to get the BIOS to make use of the other 2GB, partitioned/formatted or not. So if I were to buy a 10GB drive, in practice I'd still have a 2GB drive.

Which is all the more reason you need to consider flashing the updated BIOS! Sure, Dell may not document what they've fixed (especially for such an old product), but at least this sort of thing, I would expect them to have fixed. However, if you've done some tricks to get that second drive working, perhaps it won't after the update (just tread carefully with it). Your first drive should be fine, since you haven't needed any trickery for it.

As regards your PCI card, sure I agree with the others, perhaps it's faulty. You should test it on a known machine to be sure. However, if it's simply the case that your BIOS has failed to allocate resources to it, then that would explain what's happening. (1) Check for some "non-PnP-O/S" or similar setting, (2)update your BIOS. (3) If that fails, try loading that 'DWCFGMG.SYS' driver in your 'config.sys' file (before the other USB stuff).

Now, you may also want to play around with some PCI diagnostic utilities. Try :

http://redir.no-ip.org/mirrors/members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/

http://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=13&l=P

Joe.