Arcane approaches

Not enough that I've got five computers under my desk (makes it easier to kick'em as required!), I had to hijack a sixth - my partner's old L'Hotesse
(all my machines are named after characters from Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, as you might have guessed).

A curse lay on this little homebrew machine ever since I'd rashly converted it to an appendage hanging off MS Small Business Server some years back when it was still running Windows 98.

Bianca had stopped using it, more or less - apart from the odd fax, e-mail or letter she produced - after losing a few crucial files that demonstrated her original ownership of an idea she gave IKEA, posting a letter to Stockholm when the Aussie franchise failed to respond to her initial approach. Next thing she noticed, in a recent catalog posted by one of our daughters, was HER idea for the 'design your own' part of the kitchen section!

When I couldn't revive the original file (Bianca has a habit of writing each document to the ONE filename, in the process overwriting the contents of the previous doc of that name...nor does she make hard copies!), she cursed the machine and divorced herself from it.

Here's an opportunity for me to see if SuSE Linux 8.0 will run on this oldie, I thought one damned day in April, so I popped in the CD, rawrote three setup disks and proceeded to install Linux, wiping all trace of Win98 and MS Office..

The install went without hitches, until it disliked the S3 VirGE graphics card driving an old VGA monochrome 14in screen. No prob, I stuck in a slightly newer Diamond Stealth 2000 card instead. No way Xfree86 would serve up a decent image on this screen. I left it at the crude default and tried to interest Bianca in her new desktop, complete with comms and wordprocessing...

Would Madam deign to resume her writing of childrens' stories after a spell of 20-odd years? Not on your nellie! Not when she had to learn everything again from scratch with new software...

Keen to not impede her newly creative juices, I rashly promised to restore the status quo ante - that was, from memory, four days ago. Since then I've gone through contortions that were as cruel as they were unusual, making arcane approaches to the hard disk in a variety of ways to first rid it of Linux, then stop it from cocking a snoot at me when rebooting after I'd thought I'd exterminated it for good. (Yes I know, you're gonna remind me of fdisk /mbr - but of course I no longer had fdisk available.)

Of course, no boot/setup floppies survive on Clod Nine, in high humidity and with the ground strewn with magnetite nodules, so I grabbed an NT 3.5 Workstation CD and booted that. Worked, but I didn't like the limitations. Now that I could at least get at the CD drive again, I made three setup floppies from an NT4 CD and installed NT 4 Workstation.

This would have sufficed for Bianca's modest writing chores (there was MS Write, obviously!), but she had no fax or e-mail because NT 4 didn't know about the late model Lucent datapump aboard and I had of course no working driver disk...

So I took another approach: install DOS from flakey floppies (three sets of original MS DOS 6.22, no less), then Windows 3.11 from floppies derived from a backup CD where I'd parked the images of the MS originals that no longer worked... (3.11 WAS some considerable time ago).

Three sets of flaky but original MS-DOS 6.22 later, I'd cobbled together a DOS system of sorts, had Windows running but had no drivers for the old Creative Technology CD-ROM in the box. I could have put in an excellent SCSI CD-ROM drive and Adaptec card for which I HAD working drivers, but it seemed too much of a hassle...)

Eventually, I chanced upon an old AOpen driver disk, installed the ATAPI driver, rearranged my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to suit and told DOS to go and grab Win98 from the CD.


PREGNANT PAUSE
(during which my first granddaughter Calista was born in Hawaii)


The BEEP you just heard was Windows 98 rebooting LHotesse, and putting up its screen that sneeringly proclaimed: "Getting ready to run Windows for the first time" - telling this to ME, who's run Windows for the first time when it was still Version 2.11 or thereabouts, definitely way below 3.0!

Cheers,
Carioca

P.S.: I'm running an e-garage sale where I'll try to get rid of 20 years of computer hardware, software, manuals and magazines, including a nearly complete set of BYTE magazine. After this week I don't want to waste any more of my life trying to match up obsolete gear with newer software, or vice-versa.

P.P.S.: I tolerated Linux on LHotesse, even in mono, but it runs beautifully on a big colour screen with a Matrox card on the dedicated box christened LeMaitre! But Win98 won hands down over Linux on LHotesse in ease of instalation, use of available hardware and general good vibes...

Cheers! Here's to all geeks! (I'm toasting with a bottle of Evans & Tate 2000 Shiraz, but it's no match for the Seppelt Chalambar Shiraz we imbibed the other day before looking at the price tag!