Blogging is light because I’m building a computer out of spare parts for my niece, who’s starting USC in the fall. I had a motherboard that I thought was recent enough to not cause problems (a Diamond Multimedia Micronics C200, vintage 1998, an ATX form factor, with a 350 MHz AMD K6-2), but the BIOS couldn’t recognize hard drives larger than thirty-two gig.

(“Why would anyone ever need more than 640K of RAM?” –Bill Gates, c. 1981)

So I had to flash the BIOS with a more recent version. Problem is, in order to do that, the instructions are to boot with a DOS floppy. I’m no longer running any Windows versions older than W2K, and W2K will not create an old-style DOS bootable floppy–the old “/s” parameter is no longer recognized when floppies are formatted.

I looked around for some old DOS boot disks, but they seemed to be too old to read. So now I know that most of these floppies I’ve been hanging on to for years to preserve the data have really only been preserving dust.

What to do?

I dug out an old Toshiba laptop (state of the art and a couple thousand bucks new, about eight years ago). I can’t even put Linux on it–it’s got barely enough RAM (4 meg), but the hard drive is “only” 200 meg (which was a pretty decent sized drive in a laptop in the early nineties). But it does boot into DOS, and even Windows 3.1.

I plugged in the power supply (the battery had given up the ghost years ago), and fired it up. It booted, though it didn’t seem to recognize the trackball. I managed to navigate to a DOS window with the keyboard from Win 3.1. I formatted a system disk, and voila, took it over to the machine under construction and flashed the BIOS.

It now sees the forty-gig drive, and I’m in business. Now I’m just trying to decide whether to install Gatesware, or do a free RH 7.3 installation. I’m tempted to do the latter, to see how well it installs out of the box for a workstation, and how friendly it will be to a freshman college student.

So, off again…