 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group PowerQuest DriveCopy 2 The homebrew gets an upgrade or three Jim Maunder jimm@melbpc.org.au |
In the year since my last article was published, the old homebrew PC has suffered some home improvements. First, I should explain that it's not really a homebrew in the true sense of the word, in that I did not build it from scratch. On the other hand, the only parts remaining from the original "Dataland Bullit 386" bought new in 1992 are the mini-tower case and power supply. At the time it was a good midrange system, with an AMD 386-DX40 CPU, 4 MB RAM, 120 MB hard disk (I agonised over whether to go for a huge 170 MB instead), 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy drives, a SoundBlaster sound card and CD-ROM and a 14-inch SVGA monitor. After a couple of weeks I went back and had a 1200 bit/s internal fax/modem installed. To use it I ran MSDOS 5, the PowerMenu menu system and XtreePro. My main software was Kermit for the modem, WordPerfect 5.2 for writing, and AsEasyAs for a spreadsheet. I also had Windows 3.1, but did not use it much until I got Word 2 and Excel 2 a couple of months later.
I became a file leech, and soon discovered Terminate, which made BBS surfing much easier. Then the rot set in as I discovered the message areas, FIDOnet and Blue Wave offline mail reader. By the way, I was unemployed then, having suffered "compulsory redundancy" at the hands of a set of, umm, mediocre corporate managers at the council where I worked as a computer systems manager. So, between writing job applications and the occasional interview I had plenty of time to play computers.
First Upgrades
Of course it only took a few months before I needed some extra disk space, so I bought an enormous 210 MB hard drive at the PC show, and got Dataland to install it for me as a second drive. This was to be the last upgrade that I did not do myself. My job search led me to a group of like-minded folks attempting to start up a PC support business, and while this did not get very far, it gave me the courage to go it alone, and I went into business as James Maunder Computer Services. Advertising in the local papers, I got a bit of work fixing up home and small business computers. I encountered lots of intriguing problems, but that is another story or six.
One day I was at home doing some Microsoft Access work for a customer and got fed up with the slowness of my 386, so I went down to the wholesaler from which I bought parts and systems for customers, and lashed out on a new motherboard, a 486 DX2-66 CPU and an 8 MB RAM chip. Back home, I carefully checked the jumpers, labelled the speaker, turbo and other wires, and then removed the old motherboard and installed the new one. Now here is one for George: when I started it the first time it would only run in "slow" mode. If I laid it on the side (it's a mini tower case) it started in "high" mode. If I started it on its side and carefully lifted it back to the normal position, it switched to "slow" by itself. After much checking, tears and tearing of hair I found a work around, and the system worked fine until about a year ago. (See end of article for the answer). One of the nice things about doing work for other people was that I got to try a good range of parts and hardware, both new and traded-in, so my system had a few changes and additions over the next few years, like a network card, a 14.4 kbit/s modem, a couple of different video cards, a couple of changes of hard disk. At the time of its breakdown last year it had the 486 DX2/66 CPU, 28 MB RAM, a 410 MB hard C: drive, an 850 MB D: and E: drive, a Vibra 16 sound card, an old 2x CD-ROM and a Cirrus Logic CL5446 video card.
The Breakdown
One day last year the PC stopped working. It would power up but that's all. It would not even run the POST (power on self test). I tried swapping the CPU for my son's old 486DX4/100 without success. I tried putting my CPU in another motherboard, also without success. I fiddled with the BIOS chip. I did not pay much attention to jumper settings etc and if I had, perhaps one of the swaps might have worked. Anyway, the next Sunday saw me at Box Hill computer swap meet just looking around for something that might fix it cheaply. Eventually I settled on a very modest solution ... the cheapest "all-in-one" motherboard, an IBM 6x86 MMX233 CPU, and a 32 MB DRAM chip, all for $280.
This time I had no trouble with installing the new bits. I checked the jumpers, enabled what I wanted on the motherboard (video, IDE, ports) and disabled what I didn't want (sound), labelled the wires again, noted what disk cables went where and so on. It started first time, Windows 95 detected the changes and installed the right software, and it all worked well, not great, but good enough for me. The old SVGA monitor packed up a few months ago, so I shouted myself a nice 15-inch Videocom monitor from my old wholesaler, Butek Industries.
More Recently
However, I have been juggling disk space for some time now, so a couple of months ago I started looking for more capacity. While looking, I picked up a 64 MB RAM chip for a good price one week, and a 6.4 MB disk a couple of weeks later. I also got a "lend" of an old Matrox Millennium II video card from one of my son's friends. The RAM and the video card went in with little trouble. (RAM is never easy to install, but this was no harder than usual) I had to read the flaming manual very carefully to set the jumpers to get all the RAM to work - I have a mixture of 72-pin SIMMs and 168-pin SDRAM chips. The video card needed the latest drivers, downloaded from Matrox's Web site, to work properly. The video card made a remarkable difference to the apparent speed of my PC. The "all-in-one" video uses ordinary system RAM and was not very snappy. The last bit of the upgrade, the hard disk, was a non-trivial process, and I will describe this in some detail as well as review a couple of bits of software that I used to do it.
Now I'm on holidays so it's "Time for the Big Upgrade."
Preliminaries
After thinking about how I would swap the disks, I decided to take the easy way and partition the new disk
into three and just transfer the contents of the original two disks (three partitions) to the new one. A
minor complication was that the 850 MB disk needed Disk Manager, because the old motherboard did not support
disks over 512 MB. Another was that I do not have enough power cables for all the drives and CD-ROMs I have.
I made a boot disk with the Disk Manager driver, FDISK, FORMAT, SCANDISK and a little editor (q.exe) on it,
disconnected the CD-ROM, removed the old disks, fitted the new disk and set it as a secondary master. The two
old disks were already the primary master and slave, and I had them sitting on top of the power supply
separated by bits of cardboard. (We techies get a bit blasé about this sort of thing.)
Doing the Job (First Attempt)
I booted with the floppy, partitioned the new disk with FDISK and formatted the partitions. I then rebooted
the normal way. Windows found the disk OK, so now I could start copying the stuff across. Not so simple.
Windows has a mind of its own when it comes to drive letters. I thought I knew what was what, and set about
copying from old to new. When the three partitions were copied I removed the old disks, connected the new one
as primary master and rebooted. Woo hoo! It started and loaded Windows95, to my pleasant surprise. However,
the drive letters of the second and third partitions were the wrong way around. I expected the old C: to be
C:, the first partition of the new disk to be D:, the old D: and E: to become E: and F:, and the 2nd and 3rd
partitions of the new disk to be G: and H:. Somehow it was different, and me, being a silly old bugler, found
it too hard. Fortunately I had plenty of disk space available, so I just copied the contents around. (Make
folders called OLD_D and OLD_E, copy the whole drive into the folders, delete the original, copy the right
way from the folders.) Now I shut down and finished the swap by reconnecting the CD. When I restarted the
drive letters where mixed up again. I booted to DOS, and when I used FDISK to look at the partition
information the letters seemed OK and also when I used DIR to look at the contents. A mystery. About then I
thought about using PowerQuest ImageCopy that I reviewed a couple of years ago to re-do the installation.
While looking for it I came across PowerQuest DriveCopy 2, which had been sent to me to review. I never got
around to doing the review [Ed: Better late than never! - AN]. I reconnected the old disk as before, and
copied DriveCopy onto the old drive C:.
Running DriveCopy
DriveCopy 2 is a DOS program and although it looks like a Windows 95 program, it isn't. (See Figure 1) It will start in Windows 95 but it should not be actually used in Windows in case there are files open. It does not need to be installed - just make a copy on the hard drive as I did or make a duplicate of the 3.5-inch distribution floppy. I booted with a floppy, and since the program is "mousable", I loaded a DOS mouse driver before running DriveCopy2. After a splash screen it shows a menu, and since I had wanted to copy two disks onto one, I picked the Selective Partition Copy option. From the next screen (Figure 2) I could select the source disk and then the source partition. (My screen captures were made after I had finished the whole job, so you will just have to imagine what would happen if there were 3 disks installed.) After clicking the "Next" button I could select the disk and partition where I wanted the copy to go from a similar screen. I also had the option of deleting or resizing existing target partitions i> (Figure 3). The target could be an existing partition or unformatted "free space" on a fresh disk.
After selecting the target, the copy began, showing a progress bar. It took about 15-20 minutes to copy my approx 400 MB partitions. When each partition was done, I got the "Select Source" screen again, and started the next one.
I was concerned that DriveCopy 2 would do something funny with the disk that needed DiskManager, but it just seemed to create a fresh partition and then copy the contents without copying the DiskManager partition tables.
A reboot after rearranging the disks proved that everything worked well and almost perfectly. I quick look at the new disk with FDISK showed that the new disk now had two primary partitions (the original C: and the original D:) and a virtual drive in an extended partition. I guess that makes sense, since the original C: and D: were both primary partitions. I suppose I could have left it at that, but I was not happy with it. Time for a cuppa and a think. Hmm, I had Partition Magic somewhere, so it was time to look at that to see what it can do.
I had a bit of fun resizing partitions, resizing free space, moving and resizing partitions within the free space and copying the contents of drives to and fro until I got it right.
In the end the old homebrew has been transformed into a snappy, trouble-free and fairly modern PC with lots of spare disk space (for the next few months anyway). I could have done the disk swap without DriveCopy 2 and Partition Magic, but they certainly made the operation much easier.
Reviewed on a homebrew MMX233, with 96 MB RAM, 6.4 GB hard drive, Matrox Millennium II graphics card.
Answer: It was the turbo switch connector. I left it unconnected.
Reprinted from the December 1999 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
