Blast from the past - Can someone help with a couple of SBC's?

T

Terry Wilson

Ha! Not a P4
Not a P3
No, not even P2's

I've aqcuired a couple of Intel Pentium MMX 233 Single Board Computer's!!

http://www.allproducts.com.tw/computer/formosacom/02-lmb-586vh.html

Housed in a tank of a case

http://www.chassis-plans.com/rackmo...uter-chassis/B2000-5u-rackmount-computer.html

with a 20-Slot ISA Passive Backplane.
It's never been used, 1 GB disks still pristine.
Sounds like a jet engine when turned on. I love this thing!

Can anyone tell me the best way to add some
hard drives, and hang this on my network?

I think the bios is too old for decent size hard
drives, are there any ISA hard drive controllers
out there? How would that work with the backplane?

How to network the thing? Would it be fast enough
to say, serve up MP3 files, or maybe even play them?
Soundcard?

A manual of some sort would really be helpful.

Any ideas appreciated on what to do with this. Thanks!
 
P

philo

Terry Wilson said:
Ha! Not a P4
Not a P3
No, not even P2's

I've aqcuired a couple of Intel Pentium MMX 233 Single Board Computer's!!

http://www.allproducts.com.tw/computer/formosacom/02-lmb-586vh.html

Housed in a tank of a case

http://www.chassis-plans.com/rackmo...uter-chassis/B2000-5u-rackmount-computer.html

with a 20-Slot ISA Passive Backplane.
It's never been used, 1 GB disks still pristine.
Sounds like a jet engine when turned on. I love this thing!

Can anyone tell me the best way to add some
hard drives, and hang this on my network?

I think the bios is too old for decent size hard
drives, are there any ISA hard drive controllers
out there? How would that work with the backplane?

How to network the thing? Would it be fast enough
to say, serve up MP3 files, or maybe even play them?
Soundcard?
Click to expand...


first off, there is such thing as an ISA harddrive controller...
but being an old, ISA device...it's not likely you'd be able to use any
drive
larger than what the bios supports...however there are two possibilities i
can think of to use
a larger harddrive than the bios can support:

1) use a software drive overlay such as EZ bios

2) a drive partitioned and formatted on an other machine
will probably work in you older machine. I know as a fact that i was able
to do it with a 20 gig drive in an old p1 with an 8gig bios limit.
If you use win9x there should be no problems...but a 3rd party utility
such as Norton
may see the drive as being misconfigured due to the actual size not being
what the bios
recognizes.


Now as to networking the machine...sure
there are plenty of ISA netcards out there on the used market selling for
just
about nothing... of course being ISA, they will not be 10/100's but merely
"10".

for my own personal purposes, such cards have been fine for use on my local
network...your mileage may vary.
 
R

Robbie McFerren

If you can boot from SCSI you can go that route, if you use Linux, only the
primary master (and sometimes slave) only have to be within BIOS Specs.

As for MP3 playback this computer has MMX (Multimedia Extentions) and is
faster than the slowest computer I played an MP3 on.

Hint: If it says Pentium Pro With MMX, then it is a Pentium 2.
It should also have a few (3 to 5) PCI Slots, but since it is a backplane it
may not.
 
T

Terry Wilson

philo said:
http://www.chassis-plans.com/rackmo...uter-chassis/B2000-5u-rackmount-computer.html


first off, there is such thing as an ISA harddrive controller...
but being an old, ISA device...it's not likely you'd be able to use any
drive
larger than what the bios supports...however there are two possibilities i
can think of to use
a larger harddrive than the bios can support:

1) use a software drive overlay such as EZ bios

2) a drive partitioned and formatted on an other machine
will probably work in you older machine. I know as a fact that i was able
to do it with a 20 gig drive in an old p1 with an 8gig bios limit.
If you use win9x there should be no problems...but a 3rd party utility
such as Norton
may see the drive as being misconfigured due to the actual size not being
what the bios
recognizes.


Now as to networking the machine...sure
there are plenty of ISA netcards out there on the used market selling for
just
about nothing... of course being ISA, they will not be 10/100's but merely
"10".

for my own personal purposes, such cards have been fine for use on my local
network...your mileage may vary.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I will look at those two options. Eh, I forgot about Virus
Protection.
Guess I will have to find something light weight for that. AVG maybe.
 
T

Terry Wilson

Robbie McFerren said:
If you can boot from SCSI you can go that route, if you use Linux, only the
primary master (and sometimes slave) only have to be within BIOS Specs.

As for MP3 playback this computer has MMX (Multimedia Extentions) and is
faster than the slowest computer I played an MP3 on.

Hint: If it says Pentium Pro With MMX, then it is a Pentium 2.
It should also have a few (3 to 5) PCI Slots, but since it is a backplane it
may not.
Click to expand...

Alas, not Pentium Pro. Thanks for the SCSI idea. Not sure
if I want to sink lots of cash into big SCSI drives tho.

Also, unfortunatly, it is a 20 ISA slot backplane, so no PCI.
But I will see If I can find one with some PCI slots.

Any idea how you associate a sound card with one CPU card?
Or can you configure a single sound card for both processors?

Thanks
 
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