I came across an old computer that is a Dell Poweredge 2100/200 (by a trash can ) and i was trying to get it setup to run win 98 for my niece to play around on. The last owner had it locked down tight with passwords and I'm having trouble getting 98 loaded on it. the start up says it was windows server 2000 and all the pin connector jumpers are really different than my other machines so I can't just stick in one of my other hard drives.there is a cd rom, a 31/2 " floppy drive and then the hard drive, however there are only two spots on the mother board to hook up to - no "d drive place. I was able to format the hard drive but I can't make the computer go to the cd drive to load win 98!! I can get to the dos prompt but it only seems to recognize drives "a or b".

thanks in advance for any help!

 

I beleive you need win 98 boot disk, to put in the floppy drive, then once you use that then you can use cdrom to install windows

 

Hey! you were right! Worked great! bad news is I found out why it was by the trash - IT ONLY HAS 8 MB of hard drive space. Wow.

 

LOL! Yeah, some of those earlier pentiums just did not have big HDs. I remember when 100 megs of RAM was the "bee's knees".

My first "big" P2 was a HP 120 with only 1 gig. It was an Office model that was still boxed up and never used. For what it was, it did just fine for the three years I had it. It came with Win 3.1 which I upgraded to Win95 browser as by that time, my area finally had internet service. But all the upgrading did not leave me with much to work with when going museum sites and saving images for reference or playing some of the larger games back then (1998-2000). By the time I had started administrating the Runegame.com website in early 2000, I was having to go through my files (image mostly) to drastically cut back to make sure I had enough HD space to keep the computer working. I had looked into trying to upgrade it and slave drives but this model could not be upgraded.

By the end of 2000, I needed a newer faster Pentium with more gig space to run the game "RUNE" and anything else for the business. Also needed to upgrade to Win98 too. Finally got an eMachine 433 just before the game came out that lasted me until nearly two years ago when upgraded to an eMachine 600 (which is in storage right now). Gave the 433 to the kids. Finally got a P4 2 gig earlier this year, (HP 504 Pavilion) with 32 gig HD...why not a "40" as most were given. Dont know.

Not the best for gaming as it has an intergrated video card but does well enough for what I do. Has more than enough space for anything else I would use it for.

 

wow!!! i wish my first puter was that fast!!!
my first was a pentium processer with a lightning fast speed of 33 mhz. and it had an unbeleivable 16 meg hard drive,and 8 megs of ram!! this was a state of the arts unit when it was new, and cost $1800 back in 1991.

 

Out first computer was a TRS80 (trash 80) Model 1 from radio shack with 12K of ram and a tape for programs. Boy was that a long time ago.

 

Yeah, its amazing how fast the tech has moved on! I keep trying to stay caught up but it has pretty much grown beyond what I' m able ( or willing) to understand. the one I just put together for my son has a 160 gig hard drive and 512 mb of ram. I heard somewhere that the average household computer is more powerful than the computer system they used to land on the moon.

p.s. Anyone know if they make some kind of adapter for the pin connector ribbons that I could use to mate up one of my other hard drives to this machine?

 

At least with the age of microchips they was able to get away from the vaccuum tubes they had in the computer center at MSU which filled the whole first floor and had as much power as a current laptop.

Don't know of a connector. sorry

 

8 MB? That wouldn't have let Server 2000 install. Are you sure it's not 8 GB?

About the connector in the machine, is it a wide black one, or a little black one about 2 cm wide?

Now if it really did have an 8-MB hard drive, chances are it won't run Windows 98. Even the old 386 computers I had running Windows 3.11 had 100 MB hard drives, and they had the standard IDE connectors too (wide and black).

 

Cool! glad I could help, btw our first computer was an apple IIc.

 

Hey you kids...easy on us old guys. I started on Tubes. Those were K-Hz machines.
Disks didn't' come along for a long time, and a 10 Meg disk of two platters....on and on ad-nausium. Transistors didn't come along until '58' and soon were in hundreds of US and Foriegn stuff.
You can thank TI and Intel for what you have today.

There is a cable to connect more than one Hard drive. It uses the Port assignment term
and rolls that from one pin to another.
IT's real use is making a Disk to Disk copy, but you can use it for jumping in an extra disk. You are gonna have to get that info from a book. Probably at the local library.

 

sounds like the poweredge might have a scsi drive?

I agree, there's no way win 2k server will run on an 8mb drive. Maybe the win98 disk cant see the NTFS partitions?

 

Oh man, I completely forgot about SCSI drives. Haven't seen those for a while, mostly IDE and SATA connectors now. Yeah, I agree, an older hard drive that's not IDE is probably SCSI. Shouldn't the motherboard still have primary and secondary IDE connectors though? It might just be a matter of getting an IDE cable.

 

i think so, but i thought the poweredge was strictly a sever....no ide

 

Boy some of you must have started before I did, My first machine was an AT&T 6300, 2 5 & 1/4 floppies & 8 kb of memory blazing along at 12 mhz.

Ron