It's the
>Phoenix AwardBIOS 1.0.3. I am very surprised that such legacy features
>were chopped off.
It's not THE phoenix Award BIOS v1.0.3, It is the:
BIOS v 1.0.3, provided by the Award Bios vendor. The versions are MOBO specific, and IF Dell comes out with another, it will increment. Phoenix is merely the provider. Dell authors the code.
Actually, the entire MOBO is likely made FOR Dell by a popular MOBO maker.
There's your solution. Examine the form factor of the MOBO, and BUY a cheap MOBO that fits it, that carries the floppy utilization capacity you need! :-] Bet you could find one for less than $50.
So Dell wrote the BIOS? Interesting. I thought they were migrating farther away from the design process. At least they seem to be doing that with hardware.
Yes, by Foxconn.
Either that or get a BIOS for a similar G33 Foxconn mobo that includes the drive support I need. If the HW is on the mobo it can't be rocket science to access it. Someone said that Linux bypasses the BIOS and see all the stuff that's on the mobo but was blocked out by the BIOS that came with it. Maybe there is a kludge for Windows that does that.
My curiosity tells me that I want to figure this out some day and not take the easy road of swapping the mobo. But not right now, no time.
OK, then THEY are the BIOS authors, and THEY are in control of whether a new version ever gets released, and it is THEY who you should be contacting, NOT Dell.
Well, for me the first avenue is always to contact the comapny that sold me the merchandise. Give them a chance. That would be Dell, and so far they were pretty responsive. Foxconn will be next but I won't get my hopes up. IME the responsiveness of Chinese companies is, ahem, sub-par. Unless you happen to be the cousin twice-removed of the brother-in-law of the chief engineer there. Taiwanese companies were usually very different in that respect. I remember a long time ago when I contacted Tseng Labs (remember them?) because I needed to address their graphics chip directly out of an ultrasound scan converter. Then next day the phone rang and a woman asked whether she could help. Turns out she was one of the designers of that chip, knew it inside out and answered every single question about it and actually gave me some valuable info that wasn't in the datasheet.
The reason for this exercise is not to save a buck but to learn and also to see whether a system like this could be used in some client applications. They often require XP as the OS just like I do and legacy support is also important. Piecing together a system isn't an option and usually it has to come from places like HP or Dell.
Bullshit. I'll bet that it works under DOSBox, or QEMU either one, whether from within DOS, Windows, Linux, or even on a MAC, as the app has no way of knowing what it is running under.
It's not all DOS stuff, that would be easy. Some instrument control like for the DSO is rather fickle, requires .NET 1.1 (won't work with 2.0). Just one example.
No, this one looks like MS's fault. They botched backward compatibility. I am not the only one who found out.
Also, whether an app is considered faulty or not, many times we must live with it because there ain't anything else. Also, the old saying applies: The customer is king.
It will give you a lot of information about any computer running Windows 95 and up OS. Save the HTML page for future reference.
Here is the information on the motherboard in this computer:
Board: First International Computer, Inc. K8MC51G PCB 1.x Serial Number: C3S6397xxx Bus Clock: 201 megahertz BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 01/13/2006
OK, dimbulb, who assembled the computer, and who wrote the BIOS?
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
I wonder if the chip for the external USB floppy drive will support either 5.25" drive? It would be a niche market, but I'm sure that there would be some sales. Either that, or start a reasonably priced data conversion service.
New 5.25" drives are becoming scarce, but I have about 100 good, used
360 KB and 1.2 MB drives, along with computers that support them. If I put a clean install of Windows 98 SE, or ME on one I could burn a CDROM or copy their files to a USB stick, one floppy per folder. That way they could make as many 1.44 floppies as they want, or just keep it on the media. A few bucks per disk, plus the media and shipping costs.
BTW, I have about 1000 new Maxell 1.44 MB floppies on hand that I could use.
I am working to recover the bookkeeping data for a local non profit, after their Windows 95 computer died. They made the mistake of not replacing the computer, because it was only used a few hours a month. When the power supply started acting up, they just kept using it, even when it took them a half hour to get it to power up.
I would recommend that you tell your customers that any old media be converted while it's still readable. Some 5.25" floppies become unreadable with age. Programs like the original Norton Disk Doctor can recover a lot of files, but it takes hours, or days. If they are too far gone, you have to go the expensive route of commercial data recovery services. I wonder how much it would help, if I added another gain stage to the head preamp circuit, for those failing disks?
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
It does, I checked the datasheet of the chip that's on there.
Thing is, many don't realize that they need to get back to the original disks until something has happened. Once we even had to locate an employee who had worked at the company a long, long time ago. Luckily he had survived a serious case of cancer.
I doubt a premap would help much. The circuits in there are pretty close to optimum.
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