23 Inches Tall!
"Ooh, Matron!" 😲

Dirrty
*said in Christina Aguilera's voice*

Looking a bit fresher now, I will be taking all the plastic off the case and deep cleaning it, but for now, better!

VGA Card (PCI)
Dedicated Parallel Port Card (ISA)
Modem (ISA)
Unfortunately no soundcard, for now.
Lots O' Rust!

Ok, let's take a peak at the goodies inside:

Feline approval granted! 😺

Motherboard:
Gateway 634784-608 Socket 5
4x PCI
3x ISA

Matrox MGA Millennium 2MB PCI
+
2MB Memory Upgrade Board
=
4MB Amazing! 😍

ISA Parallel Port Card
Appears to be 8-bit, notice none of the 16-bit pins go anywhere (might be wrong).

8-bit Hardware Modem, notice that cheeky EPROM, XT-IDE potential 🤔🤔🤔

64K of potential!

I've decided that I need to start doing more videos and get over this irrational dislike for the sound of my own voice.
Here's the first power on test! 😳🤞

Floppy Drive Boot Test:

One thing I've discovered with this machine, something I've had with early Pentium PC's before- it's insanely fussy on harddrive solutions.
SD-IDE ❌
SATA-IDE ❌
It seems to only like either very small IDE drives, or simple CF-IDE, the BIOS is very limited.

I seem to have gotten through my larger CF cards, I have a bunch of smaller ones, <512MB. I do however have one 1GB, that I've managed to install an old version of DSL (Knoppix based) Linux distro.

The system works flawlessly, I'm super happy the Matrox is working well @ 1280x1024. There's something magical about using Linux on a system that's nearly 30 years old, it's fun!

A while ago I made a PCI based XT-IDE card for such computers, I used this one in another build, but I may make another, rather than using a software drive overlay solution.

So, I've been messing with storage options again, EZ Drive fails, and Ontrack was tricky. Using all the three options it gives to setup the bios. But looks like I've figured it out, here's the error I kept getting.

So, I had to manually set the bios options for the drive, to give me roughly the storage on the SD card (SD to IDE). Then Ontrack let me setup a Fat32 partition. Instead of formatting it in Ontrack, I used format on the Win98 setup. I'm currently installing Win98 as a test...

32GB SD BTW.
I want multiple os's on this:
MS-DOS
Windows 95/98
Also a useable Linux install, DSL Knoppix I think.
Fingers crossed this works and is bootable, very fiddly!

I forgot something, I'm not using the original PSU, so the front fan is not powered on, I've setup a usb fan to cool the CPU (wasn't too hot, but safety first).

So far, so good 👍

Looking good.....

Perfecto 👌

So I've discovered there's a way newer bios than the one this machine has installed.
I'm currently running:
BIOS Version 1.00.05. BROT
The newest version addresses issues with the HDD detection, it's:
BIOS Version 1.00.10. BROT
The bios chip is soldered, but I'm going to try it.

Perfect!
The update went well and it's now detecting lots more new drives, SD to IDE and also SATA to IDE.
There's an 8.4GB limit, but that's way bigger than anything that was available when the PC was built, so I'm happy.

Partition Magic 8 can see the full amount:

Quickly tested a Windows 95 install, all went well. I'm thinking that I'm going to put multiple drives in here and have a boot loader CF, Windows 98 with MS-DOS mode, plus some other OS's, like Linux, BSD etc. Should be fun to test out.