24pin to 20pin adapters are luckily available locally. DOS booting next week???
also this board is the bigger mATX variant. do i have standoffs to accommodate that? ha ha ha of course not
no wait i do!!
"PC ???" bin saves the day 😍
ive installed the board + i/o shield, put in a CMOS battery and thats about all that can be done today
curiously it seems that both the cooler and adapter are ready for pickup now despite it being saturday. DOS today???
cooler installation is a bit puzzling. the caps get in the way of the clips
i could unscrew the bracket from the mobo but then it is impossible to screw it back with the cooler clip in the way
maybe if i carefully bend the caps.. 😬
a bit of terrifying capacitor wiggling did the trick indeed
this board is honestly a masterclass in the awkward placement of things
but its fine. i am ready to try powering on
apologies for the IDE terminology
ok then i need to think about storage. this thing does appear to have SATA. not sure if it can boot from USB for installation purposes
i made a FreeDOS FullUSB drive but will continue after dinner and sauna
(short detour to unfuck power settings on my laptop to make it charge again)
well, i can boot into FreeDOS on the USB drive but it doesnt seem to see the SATA HDD at all
maybe i will just install XP since i know my way around that
well, booting XP installer from USB turns out to be harder than even OS 9. pondering whether burning a CD or installing to the HDD via a VM would be less annoying
also i am starting to want a PicoIDE
partner fell asleep so i gotta quietly move this stuff out of the living room 😄
for the VM route i guess i first need a SATA AHCI driver for the controller VirtualBox emulates and then another one post installation for the actual mobo. urgh
now making an ISO containing ICH8M driver using nLite...
"Don't contact Microsoft for troubleshooting nLited installations" dont tell me what to do!!
yes hello john microsoft. kindly fix my XP installation
man Disk Management sucks (on Windows 10)
The most dependable Windows® for business computing
wow theres installation music? i dont think ive ever had working audio at this point before
i believe i have the correct driver installed now but the Athlon machine will not boot from the SATA drive
fine. i will try IDE
Your computer will be faster and more reliable
VM-installed XP on an IDE drive gets a bit further, to the "Windows failed to start up" screen where it offers safe mode and such. but no luck from there, safe mode or not
in order to feel like i accomplished something before i go to bed i installed Debian 12. but i accidentally accepted the default GNOME install option. it takes several eternities to boot and runs at 1 frame per sometimes. lol
anyway sleep now, more suffering later
this is me trying to install FreeDOS to the IDE drive, which unlike SATA was at least detected. but.. yeah
i did the minimal install and that seems to have finished ok
i was internet-brainedly looking for a FreeDOS beginner's guide today but there is of course documentation built in
the next thing is to transfer files to the machine somehow. probably over USB or LAN. but im sleepy
okay USB just works, at least if i have the drive plugged in on boot. nice