From: Jonathan Berry (jberry_at_islandnet.com)
Date: Sat Oct 06 2001 - 11:47:06 EDT
As Dominique pointed out, I don't have the cable. I bought my
600E from a list member. "At no extra charge", I got a Syquest
(?) 120 MB dual ultra(slim)bay drive instead of a vanilla floppy.
I haven't taken advantage of the greater capacity, as I have
misplaced the 120 MB media that came with the drive. So far as
operability goes, I have had problems. On the good side, the
600E was able (eventually) to boot from it, so I was able to
fdisk the first partition of the new drive to be active. Oh
yes, the 20 GB drive is an IBM one that I got on sale a couple of
months back to upgrade the Hitachi 6 GB that came with the
machine. The new drive is even quieter than the old one, but
it does go click-click-click more often. I gather that is
normal for this model, not the "click of death" of an Iomega
Zipdrive.
On the bad side, of course, IBM is still producing drivers that
require the use of a floppy. Even the BIOS upgrade for the
600E CD-ROM goes onto a floppy. Maybe I can copy the files
from the floppy to the hard drive and remount the CD-ROM. But
at the very least it's annoying.
Win2000's "Backup" application allows the creation of an
"Emergency Repair Disk". But it will only do it to Drive A.
The internal drive comes up in Win2000 as Drive B. I found no
way to change the drive's designation (even when I logged on as
Administrator). Nor did I find any Registry entry that would
seem to allow the Emergency Repair Disk to be drive B.
Microsoft's own documentation about manually preparing an
Emergency Repair Disk says simply to copy the files from
%systemroot%\repair to a formatted floppy. What they don't say
is that the said directory has about 6 MB more files in it than
a floppy can hold. I left off the "software" and "system" files,
the two largest.
So the internal diskette drive has been a pain. These days one
uses a diskette rarely enough for it to be separate, but
importantly enough that it should not replace whatever is on
the second spindle. Yes, the external diskette configuration of
my old 701C is much preferable. Can I buy a separate cable
that will make the 701C drive run on a 600E?
In the end, I decided to set up a dual-boot Win 98 and Win2000
system. Win2K is not as compatible with older programs. I
lost yesterday morning's email because the "Import" program of
YARN95 does not work under Win2K (at least, not in the
machine's current state). Strangely, the "Import" program from
the old DOS version of YARN works fine.
Win2K is far more different from Win98 than 98 is from, say,
Win95. For example, there is no scandisk in W2K, you have to
remember the word chkdsk from your old DOS days. There is no
fdisk, you have to do that stuff in the Disk Management app.
Microsoft makes no attempt to document these differences in the
Help suite.
I used Disk Management to partition and format part of the
drive to NTFS. The system gave me dire warnings that I had to
edit boot.ini or else the machine would not boot. The warnings
are a Good Thing. It is strange, however, that in other
changes (such as how many seconds to wait for you to press
Enter when you have set up a dual boot), Win2K is able to edit
boot.ini on its own. Also, the warnings don't tell you where
boot.ini is (it's on C:\, even if you boot from a different
partition), nor how to deal with the fact that it is both a
System and a Hidden file. Using Explorer as it comes out of
the box from Microsoft, the average user would never be able to
find that file. Ah, Microsoft.
So far, I find Win2K faster (even though the machine is only
128 Meg RAM) and reacts more properly (e.g., coming out of
suspend) compared to Win98.
Thanks to all for your help!
>You could certainly copy the install files to the HD. However, there
>are a couple of other alternatives. First of all, the MS Windows 2000
>installation CD should be bootable, so just set the CD drive ahead of
>the HD in the boot order (via the BIOS 'Startup' section) and then, when
>you boot, you should get the choice of booting from the CD. Also, to
>alleviate your problem of the Win98 boot disk and Win2000 CD, just hook
>the floppy up externally. Then you have both floppy and CD access.
>
>HTH,
>Rob
>
>jberry_at_islandnet.com wrote:
>
>> The IBM page on this has a 26-step procedure, but I couldn't
>> even get to step 2:
>>
>> Installing Windows 2000
>> 1. Boot the machine using a Microsoft Windows 98 boot disk.
>> 2. At command prompt, insert the Windows 2000 CD.
>>
>> Sorry, the boot disk (3.5") and the CD are on the same spindle.
>> Or is there such a thing as a Win 98 boot CD?
>>
>> I assume that it's just a question of copying all Windows 2000
>> CD files to the new hard drive, and then following step 1.
>> Yes?
>>
>> Has anybody posted instructions that are better thought out
>> than IBM's ?
>>
>> http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-4G3S2V.html
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
-- cheers Jonathan Berry http://www.islandnet.com/~jberry/ to know more than you want
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