I-Appliance BBS - 3.5" Hard drive connection to Webplayer problem (details)

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3.5" Hard drive connection to Webplayer problem (details)

New Message 3.5" Hard drive connection to Webplayer problem (details) (modified 0 times) maldoror

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Can anyone find what I am doing wrong here? I can't get the webplayer to recognize the 3.5" hard drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar 1.6 GB drive.
1. I went into the bios and enabled primary IDE, DOS and Win95 options in the bios. Are there any other options that must be enabled?
2. I formatted the 3.5" drive, made the partition primary, and installed win95 on it.
3. I connected a 44 pin cable to the ide pins on the webplayer with the red strip facing towards the back side of the webplayer.
4. I connected the 44pin cable coming from the webplayer to a 44/40 pin adapter (using a gender converter so the 44 pin cable could plug into the 44pin plug on the adapter). The red stripe of the 44 pin cable is lined up with pin 1 on the adapter.
5. I connected a 40 pin 3.5" drive cable to the 40 pin side of the adapter with the red stripe lined up with pin 1.
6. I connected the 3.5" drive with win95 installed to the 40 pin cable (which is connected to the 40/44pin adapter). I have the 3.5" drive plugged into an atx power supply.
When I boot the webplayer up it gives me a dos screen, shows the cpu speed, reads the ram then goes to a screen showing the system config but it says no hard drive on the system config. Then it loads to a screen with a bunch of characters that fill the screen. Then it loads the virgin dial-up screen. It just won't boot the hard drive. I have tried setting the drive to master (single drive), master (dual drive), cable select, and even slave drive (dual) and nothing works. I verified that the drive boots to windows 95 when hooked up to my athlon system. Any ideas? Thanks.

12-07-2000 13:16:06

New Message RE:3.5 (modified 0 times) kapheen

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I'm a complete newbie to this, so my information may be very incorrect, but it looks like the drive needs to be FAT16 and contain DOS. At least that seems to be what's needed to upload the embed98.img onto the DOC. Some people are apparently using an IDE drive to run their OS (as it seems you are trying), but I've not seen any specifics regarding that so far. Maybe the key is in formatting the drive with FAT16?
I'm very curious about what requirements are needed. I'd love to make a stripped down version of Win2K and load it onto the DOC and run an IDE drive for "updatables" and downloads. I find Win2K much more stable, and at least for me, much easier to use than Win98. I'd be happy to run QNX, such as the QNX demo loaded onto the DOC, but what would you do for something like a word processor, or a media player? BeOS also seems like a great idea, but you have to join their developer community to get the necessary tools to make a BeOS IA (internet appliance) .img to load to the DOC. Out of all of these I think that the Win2K idea would be the best bet, but I think I might have to run it from the IDE, and not the DOC. My logic may be flawed, but I think that Win2K, while bloated, could provide better support for this machine than Win98. The OS is much closer in age to the hardware and should be able to understand what it's "seeing" during an installation. When Win98 was released there weren't many USB devices available and LCD screens were nearly non-existent. I'm not really sure what Win2K would think about the keyboard mouse combo though. It would be great if we had more detailed information on how the embed98.img was created (hint, hint).
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? Any specs on drive formatting and the like?
Why does it hurt when I <P>?

12-07-2000 14:04:19

New Message RE:3.5 (modified 0 times) kapheen

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Sorry to make another post, but it won't let me modify my first one.
Have you tried removing the DOC? It's a little drastic, but the Web Player can't boot what isn't there. Maybe that would force it to look at the IDE drive.
Why does it hurt when I <P>?

12-07-2000 14:08:37

New Message RE:3.5 (modified 0 times) M_firmature

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Alrighty, To the first post, The funny letters and colors mean that the doc is loading, be sure in the bios that the
hard drive is auto detect. The other thing that you said is "Preinstalled win95" did you mean the cabs or a running
version? The cabs will do you some good but a fully installed version will just cause trouble. The other thing that I can think of is your connection method, I would suggest contact http://www.badflash.com and have a 2.5 to 3.5 wire made. To the second post, It would seem like Win2k will work but... You are actually thinking about a os that runs ok with 256MB
ram on a system with 64mb, the hard drive will have to swap like crazy. Although this system is in the min. requirements for win2k I don't think that it is a good cannidate for it. It may have a little better diver support but
if you were to crap out your kernel loader or another nt***.** system file then you would be in VERY bad shape.

12-07-2000 15:04:14

New Message Win2k (modified 0 times) famewolf

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There are NO drivers for the video, sound and ide under win2k.

12-07-2000 17:00:35

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