Floppy drive not responding.

HermanAA hermanaa at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 11:11:55 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 08:47 +0200, Xandros Pilosa wrote:
> HermanAA wrote:
> 
> --snip--
> 
>   Plus, depending on how old the system is, Win95 may be the
> >> better choice over WinXP.
> 
> I am not so shore about that, concerning security at least. Note, that 
> win95 is not supported any more by ms, neither by a majority of 
> wf/anivirus programs, I think.

Both Camly and myself know XP. We are unfamiliar with WIN95.
We have the install-CD for XP (and not for WIN95).

> > The Read-Only is already hooked-up at Camly. But her WIN95 has no
> > driver.
> 
> You don´t need any drivers to run a live cd with suitable (to her 
> hardware) linux distribution as long as bios recognizes the cd drive.

The BIOS did not recognize the drive afaict.
However, we can open and close the drive door under WIN95 control.
 (does this mean there is hope?)
 We could not read a CD. We did not try very hard. We went looking for a
driver.
Being familiar with Rescue floppies (and the CDROM access they provide),
we went the boot-floppy route.

This is an old DELL desktop computer. It has warning 'case has been
opened since previous use' (or similar). It has a microswitch for
sensing 'cover off'.
Power-ON to WIN95 screen takes very long.
Camly says it has USB (maybe not working).
It has 2 Harddisks of 1 GB each. It has 256 MB memory.
We will look for more memory.
I have a spare 8GB harddisk to contribute.
Camly feels lost without a CDROM drive, so we concentrate on that.
(maybe testing tomorrow).

> > I Googled for the CD-driver and instructions.
> > To prepare a diskette for her, I installed a Floppy-drive in my system.
> >  .... and ran into problems. (and asked you for help)
> 
> You may be able to hook the cd drive (if the the bios has that option) 
> -> run live sesion of linux-> mount hd-> search the net for win95 
> drivers (if you insist on that os)-> save drivers on hd and install them 
> from win95.
> Again, I don´t think it is the best choice.

The BIOS does not mention CD. I dont expect WIN95 can access the CDROM
drive. I will do some more checking. (maybe we jumped to conclusions too
early?)
I remember Camly was searching for the driver, finding none.

We have a working WIN95.
We have MSDOS command-line.
It is hard to spend so much time on history ... (is our feeling).
 We should like to see results.

As mentioned before: A Puppy Linux CD is already with Camly.
 (A Ubuntu CD is waiting ....)
She can have it both ways: A dual-boot system is easily made.
 (she does not know that yet .....).
Camly has (considerable) experience on an IBM-laptop.
This girl has potential: She was looking around for CDROM-drivers like a
pro. Also I did not have to hookup any floppy or CDROM, she did it all
after I told her what to look for (2 harddr. connectors, 1
floppy-connector, IDE cable-orientation, here are my old cables).

Herman in PHL.
-- 
Herman.
www.qrz.com/n0jn. Just one click to see me.





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