The p60 in pieces on my bed.
THE STORY
When I arrived back at school second semester I came with a 425mb Western Digital Caviar 2420 hard drive to install in my p60, which had been running various servers (including a rather successful Quake CTF one) under Linux.
The IDE cable attached between my ATronics International IDEal PCI HDD Card (no, p60s do not have onboard hdd controllers) and my identical Caviar 2420 hard drive has only one hdd plug.
The only other two drive cable I had in the room at the time was 39 pin (one of the holes in the center of the cable was plugged up.
In my excited rush to see my box back up and running with two drives (I was extremely hard up for space) I commited the fatal flaw.
(I still can't believe I did this.)
I bent one of the pins on the hdd controller card so that the cable would fit. As luck woudl have it, It was upside down. I BENT THE WRONG PIN OFF. @^@#^@#J^@
So anyway. I've spent the last three weeks trying to get the p60 to boot.
At first I tried to stick paper clips and pieces of tin/lead wire in the cable where the pins shoudl have been but that didn't work at all.
So I rode across town on my bike in sub zero weather to Entre Computers, who agreed that the card was indeed broken and would need to be replaced. I then purchased a DTC 22somethingorantoher card from them and spend an hour or so playing with it.
I couldn't get it to work so I called DTC customer support who put me on hold for 20 mins (this is Long distance BTW) and then some obviously computer-illterate guy read off of a checklist until we went through the entire list and the problem was not solved.
At this point he informed me that some DTC cards are "incompatable" with intel motherboards. I have no idea what kind of motherboard this is (more about this later) so I hung up and rode all the way out to Entre to return my card the next day.
The next day I rode my bike (it just wouldn't be the same without that sub zero weather) to "PolyTex Computer" out on the corner of Ivy and Alderman. They assured me that although they had no PCI HDD Controllers, they DID have some ISA ones coming in later that week.
A few days later I rode back around closing (a classic procrastination technique) and picked up what the employee SAID was a isa hdd controller card.
Well, it turned out to be a floppy/ i/o controller so I got to take that back the next day and get a refund.
At this point I was desperate. I called up the place back in Williamsburg where I bought the thing. (must be a high turnaround there, none of the techs had any experience with p60s)
Of course they didn't have a PCI hdd controller in stock so they sent me an ISA one.
My parents brought it up that weekend when they came up for my birthday.
Boy was I surprised when I found out it was made by DTC.
As luck would have it, (doesn't it always?) it didn't work despite hours of tweaking.
It turns out I already have a DTC 2280 isa card acting as a floppy/ i/o controller and the Atronics IDEal PCI was the hdd controller.
Well neither the original DTC 2280 that was already in the computer nor the new 2280-E my parents brought up worked as a HDD controller, although the mouse and the fdd worked with both of them.
I found the ATI page on the internet, fired them off an email about a replacement card, and they replied with a phone number. I ordered an ATI IDEal PCI card and it arrived today.
Lo and behold! I can't get it to boot.
I've played with it for a few hours with no luck. I thought my motherboard might lend itself to some answers since the BIOS, dated 1993 from AMIBIOS, didnt have jack shit for options about the controllers.
So I called AMIBIOS and of course waited on hold for awhile then the tech told me that based on the serial # i read him from the post screen, my motherboard was made by, and i quote "free computer".
A few netsearches turned up nothing. There are a few banks of jumpers on my mboard yet no printed explanation of them. Of course I don't have the manual and neither does the place I got it from.
As a last ditch effort I took the motherboard out of the case and looked at the back to see if the jumper explanations were there. (hahaha yeah well they COULD have been there)
Since i had everything in pieces, I thought now might be a good time to take some dumb ass pictures with my camera. It is here that this story catches up with the present.
At this point I guess I'll put it back together and play with it some more.
wendigo in various phases of frustration.
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