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Good luck or bad continued, Putting a Pentium MB into an IBM 5160 case

F

framer

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 27, 2008
Messages
584
Location
Murrell's Inlet SC
What I'm doing is redoing a few vintage system and ended up with a left over 5160 case.

I had 1st selected an old Tyan 1564S with 32MB of RAM in the 1st memory bank and had it almost ready to button up then changed my plans. I took apart another tower that was setup using a Tyan 1564D with 256MB and setup for NT 4.0 server software and put that in the 5160 case. I had to use plastic stand off on the MB as the only hole that lined up was for the screw by the power connector. None of the other holes lined up but the standoff worked perfect. This board needs to be insulated from the case, so this mounting made that easy.

I had to cut off 1/4 inch on the back edge of the left bay over to the support, the whole front support had to go and widen the top system board support to allow more space over the board. I also added a HD bay under the right side by removing a support and drilling a couple of hold to attach a HD from the bottom. This board was 4 banks for memory "8 slots" , only bank 1 & 2 are accessible as there is no room under the left drive bay for memory sticks. It also restricts what you can put in the bottom left bay because the stick height is higher than the bottom of the bay.
I also made a couple of brackets to support 4 HH devices in the two FH bays.


It's up and running but will take another week to finish as I want all black color on the front. It's going to have a 40G IDE HD in that lower bay. This will be used for data and accessible from what ever OS that's used. 1 DVD writer, 1 3 1/2 1.44 FD and a front panel that allows USB CF SD card support. The last bay may have a duel 2 1/2 sata drive rack. I've ordered off ebay an IDE to dual SATA card that just plugs into the IDE port on the MB. The board has a USB 1.1 port but I added a PCI card that has two USB 2.0 9 pin headers. The video card is a ATI Mach64 with a 3DFX v1.0 board.

I tested the 1564S w/ 32MB using W2K using a CF drive. It worked better than I thought it would, a bit slow but doable. With the duel board and 256MB it should work fine. It should run win98 quite well also. That why I want a drive bay to swap OS.

I will also keep the NT4 server HD as I may want to use that later.
I'll post photos when done.

I hope it has that real retro look and a killer win98 machine.

framer
 
I got some very sharp xacto blades to remove anything. Really I can sand blast them if needed.

I just found a dock w/3.5 + 2.5 in one 5.25 bay for SATA, I can turn on either or both drives. It was more than I wanted to spend $39.00 but it was less than the wife's nail and toes this week.....

I really hope that IDE -> SATA converter works.
 
I spent the last couple nights with 4 HD's setting up 4 different OS for this computer. I've loaded DOS 6.2/Win311, NT4, Win95b, W2k on the 4 HD. I will also be setting up a Win98SE drive later.

With W2k all the USB posts work, 2 USB 1.1 on the MB and 4 USB 2.0 on the PCI expansion card. I expect to get it working later on the W95 and W98SE, NT4 won't even try. I'm using an Intel Pro100 S network card. I was able to find all the driver for all OS including NT4 on the Intel support website.

Question: Is there a modern browser that will work with W95, NT4, W98SE? IE 5 or 6 just does not cut it today.


The ATI Mach64 works with all OS. The 3Dfx works fine with DOS games and the W95 HD.

framer
 
Try an older version of Opera. I just installed Opera 12.02 on a Win2K system.

If you're running Win98SE, try installing KernelEx, along with the unofficial sevice pack. You should be able to at least run Opera 10.10-10.64--and if you've got enough memory, you may even succeed with some versions of Firefox in the 3.0+ range, but they tend to be pretty slow on older iron.

You may have to go scurrying for plugins, but Adobe does offer a package for Flash in their "developers' section" that should run just fine.

I'm running an Intel 810E chipset with a 866 MHz P3 with 256M of SDRAM using Win2K and with Opera the result is quite usable; impressive even.
 
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Well, to be perfectly fair, NT4's power management left a lot to be desired. It took a rework of the basic driver interface to get power management and plug-and-play working decently.

USB support in Win95 was horrible and is only adequate in Win98SE.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Have a read of this http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/usb.htm
Click to expand...

OK, Now I'll have to work on USB on the NT4 setup.

Chuck,
The one thing I like about the Tyan board is the amount of memory I can put on it. I currently have 4-64MB sticks for 256MB total. The duel processor IMHO will only help with W2K and NT4. I have matching Intel 233 MMX processor in the system. I've been surprised at the usability of W2k on the system.
 
Of all of the versions of NT, 2K still ranks as my favorite. I've used every version since 3.1. 2K is reasonably lean and very stable. If you do decide to go that way, be sure to grab the SP4 update and the final roll-up from Microsoft.

Something that you may want to consider is the "Extended Kernel" for 2K, which adds quite a few XP APIs. The latest versions of this, amazingly enough, are dated in 2013.
 
framer said:
OK, Now I'll have to work on USB on the NT4 setup.

Chuck,
The one thing I like about the Tyan board is the amount of memory I can put on it. I currently have 4-64MB sticks for 256MB total. The duel processor IMHO will only help with W2K and NT4. I have matching Intel 233 MMX processor in the system. I've been surprised at the usability of W2k on the system.
Click to expand...

From the link: http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/usb.htm

[h=3]Conclusion:[/h] I wish people would stop making comments like 'USB is not supported under NT4' - If you must comment please make it accurate, example: 'Microsoft have made the commercial decision not to provide NT4 USB support - but some manufacturers provide support for specific USB devices on NT4.'
===========================================================================================

If it was a bar bet, you'd win. Yes, there were some "dedicated" USB hardware for NT4 . But the common items like a mouse, keyboard, or printer weren't available. H/P SCSI printers and scanners were big on office NT4 rigs in the government at that time, so USB wasn't a factor as far as productivity was concerned. The big transition from WIN98 to NT4 didn't last long - as soon as Xp hit the street, most government agencies had it. I don't know of any actual governmental commitment for W2k other than some activities that were out of the mainline support channels (I had a copy in my office for evaluation purposes) may have had a few copies floating about.

My P-III tweener runs Xp and the best I can find for it is IE8, however there is a chance that Chrome may work if I put some more time in it. The reason I mention it is that once you've "spoiled" yourself on a modern PC, with their dual/quad/hex cores and tons of RAM, you will be more or less be 'underwhelmed' at you new retro browsing speed. Actually, you will need the patience of Job. I only use the tweener browser for downloads and updates. The up side to it all is being able to say that you made it work. Good luck on your NT USB endeavor.

P.S. The reason that I cited the government at all is because no one buys more stuff/crap than the US Government.

[h=3]
[/h]
 
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I'll add that I have a 1 Mbps DSL link, so browsing on any of my systems is no heady experience in raw speed. I find that most browsers are pretty much unusable on Win98SE, but Win2K on a P3 isn't horrible. In fact, if you're like me, you set your XP interfaces to "Windows Classic" so it's difficult to tell the difference between 2K and XP with casual use.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I'll add that I have a 1 Mbps DSL link, so browsing on any of my systems is no heady experience in raw speed. I find that most browsers are pretty much unusable on Win98SE, but Win2K on a P3 isn't horrible. In fact, if you're like me, you set your XP interfaces to "Windows Classic" so it's difficult to tell the difference between 2K and XP with casual use.
Click to expand...

Yep, I'll buy that. It's all in what you're used to and how high your expectations are. The reason I stay with Xp for a tweener is the availability of drivers. Most, if not all of the later PCI peripheral boards only support down to Xp. I just don't seem to have a place or need for W2K, although I always thought that it was a nice, smooth OS. It might be interesting to give it (W2K) a shot on one of my faster PCI 486 machines just for the heck of it. Probably terribly slow loading but I'm not in much of a hurry these days either.
 
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Well, I'll allow that when I first tested the beta versions of XP "Whistler", I did so on a P1/Cyrix PR233 system and thought that it was unbearably slow.

Times change, I suppose.
 
Agent Orange said:
The reason I stay with Xp for a tweener is the availability of drivers. Most, if not all of the later PCI peripheral boards only support down to Xp.
Click to expand...
My tweener runs DOS 3.3, DOS 6.22, WIN98SE DOS (for FAT32 with a command prompt on a large {>528MB} hard drive), WIN ME, WIN XP and anything else I care to have it run. These all run on a machine with a 233 MHz CPU on a board with four PCI and three ISA slots. I have two mobile hard drive racks in two of the 5¼" bays so it's simple to switch drives (and OSes) in an instant. It also has both floppy drives, is on my network and hosts my dot matrix printer for the rest of the network with its parallel port.
 
I got that IDE to SATA adapter last night. Yes it works with issues. I need another day to play with it before I comment on it. I'd forgot about the 127GB limit on the ATA interface and the adapter may not be compatible with the older ATA device. The Doc's only say it compliant with the 100/133 EIDE PIDE interface.

FYI When 1st installed it on the PRI Port would not recognize the DVD drive on the 2nd IDE port, I switch it to an old CDROM drive and it worked. The W2K installation fail when registering was about 1/2 way done. Speed was slow, real slow.

framer
 
framer said:
I'd forgot about the 127GB limit on the ATA interface and the adapter may not be compatible with the older ATA device.
Click to expand...

Technically speaking it's not a limitation of the ATA interface, it's a software limitation (meaning you need support for 48 bit LBA). This page might be useful.
 
I understand that and know it's addressed in the SP4 update. But the catch-22 is when you install the original OS it does not have that 48 bit LBA yet. I need to fdisk and partition the drive before I install W2k. I've ordered a "hopefully", better IDE to SATA adapter, different chipset, to address some issues I found. Last shot at it or not. I may throw in an old Promise IDE controller card to see if they work better.
 
I tackled this by setting up the (smaller) partition table, then later expanding it using the GParted LiveCD.

There's some concern that your system partition should be rather small and that you place all of your personal stuff (even "Documents and Settings") on a separate partition. I go one further by placing my temp directory and swap file on a third partition.

Using GParted, you can move and resize any of these.

Another tip: If you're using Win2K, you may want to copy over some of the .INF files from XP for USB devices. I had a Sony USB floppy which isn't covered by 2K, but simply copying over "usbstor.inf" from the /WINDOWS/INF directory on an XP system to /WINNT/INF on the 2K system fixed that. I suspect it would similarly fix the same issue with Win98SE, as they do share minidriver info.

There's also an "Unofficial SP5" for 2K that includes many of Microsoft's late hot patches that never made it into SP4. Well worth getting, IMOHO.
 
Well I'm going to put off the SATA thingy. I've tried it also with an old Promise controller. It worked with a Promise ATA100 PCI card but the adapter sticks up to high to close the case. I'll start plan "B" tonight. I already have 4-different IDE drives programed with the different OS so I'll make my own shorter caddy to swap them. No problem....

framer
 
I'm working on the Kiss Method, 4-partitions 4-OS W95b W98SE NT4sp6 & W2ksp4 I then will use the 30gb drive install under the right side bay for a data area for all the OS formatted to FAT32.

The problem in putting a HD dock in, is there is not enough room to the PS in the case. A SATA Dock was shorter but I have my doubts about getting SATA to work with the oldest OS.

I could cut the PS case to get the IDE dock to fit but "Why"?

framer
 
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