Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Generally speaking, OS/2 is a breeze to configure, but tonight, seeing as I decided to finally get around to doing that hard drive upgrade on the spare back office system that I've been sort of half doing for months now, it decided to be a bitch.
I've had my 9GB Quantum Atlas IV spare for ages - it's the drive that I pulled out of my home system to replace with that famous WD100JB that the Prof thinks I am a heretic for saying was not fast enough. Nice drive too: fast and very quiet.
The old drive in the spare back office system is another Quantum, a Viking II (2.2GB 7200 RPM SCSI) and although the system lives on the LAN, it's dual boot (98SE and OS/2 4.5) and 2.2GB just ain't enough anymore. Since we replaced the old steam driven fax machine with a scanner, we were forever running out of space on the Windows side, and didn't have much to spare on the OS/2 half either.
So, having ported the Windows install over a couple of months ago, I finally got around to the other half of the job. And - perhaps foolishly - decided to install OS/2 from scratch instead of just copying the old install over.
Everything went fine until I got to the network card. Which Intel 10/100 adaptor was it again? I dragged a driver off the tech server (one of the other K6-IIIs, down at the other end of the building), dropped it onto floppy disc. Installed it no problem.
Reboot.
No network card detected!
Fiddle. Reboot. Stuff about. Reload the driver.
Hmm... Must be the wrong driver. Back to the tech server, root around, eventually find a different Intel 10/100 NIC driver. Install that. Reboot.
Still no go. At this stage, I had pretty much decided that the card had failed. I doubted that it was a plug and play problem because OS/2 is more or less immune to P&P problems, and anyway I hadn't changed anything except the hard disc.
Well, the one nice thing about dual boot systems is that you can sometimes use one OS to troubleshoot the other. So I re-enabled the Boot Manager (which was switched off for the duration of the ECS install) and booted Win98 - intending to (a) see if the network card was still working, and (b) find out exactly which particular flavour of Intel 10/100 NIC it was.
System => properties => device manager => network adaptors
Ahh .... Problem solved.
It's one of those Intel network cards that happen to be made by a different company, A-Open in this case. And also happens to have a Realtech 8139 bloody chip in it.Quite the most unusual Intel network card I have ever seen.
It was at this point that I remembered that I put the Intel NIC in the other K6-III machine, the tech server, and that this one has, and always has had, a Realtek card.
Two minutes later, I had dropped the Realtech drivers onto a floppy, installed them, rebooted ... and there you go.
Who sez I can't fix my own networks?
I've had my 9GB Quantum Atlas IV spare for ages - it's the drive that I pulled out of my home system to replace with that famous WD100JB that the Prof thinks I am a heretic for saying was not fast enough. Nice drive too: fast and very quiet.
The old drive in the spare back office system is another Quantum, a Viking II (2.2GB 7200 RPM SCSI) and although the system lives on the LAN, it's dual boot (98SE and OS/2 4.5) and 2.2GB just ain't enough anymore. Since we replaced the old steam driven fax machine with a scanner, we were forever running out of space on the Windows side, and didn't have much to spare on the OS/2 half either.
So, having ported the Windows install over a couple of months ago, I finally got around to the other half of the job. And - perhaps foolishly - decided to install OS/2 from scratch instead of just copying the old install over.
Everything went fine until I got to the network card. Which Intel 10/100 adaptor was it again? I dragged a driver off the tech server (one of the other K6-IIIs, down at the other end of the building), dropped it onto floppy disc. Installed it no problem.
Reboot.
No network card detected!
Fiddle. Reboot. Stuff about. Reload the driver.
Hmm... Must be the wrong driver. Back to the tech server, root around, eventually find a different Intel 10/100 NIC driver. Install that. Reboot.
Still no go. At this stage, I had pretty much decided that the card had failed. I doubted that it was a plug and play problem because OS/2 is more or less immune to P&P problems, and anyway I hadn't changed anything except the hard disc.
Well, the one nice thing about dual boot systems is that you can sometimes use one OS to troubleshoot the other. So I re-enabled the Boot Manager (which was switched off for the duration of the ECS install) and booted Win98 - intending to (a) see if the network card was still working, and (b) find out exactly which particular flavour of Intel 10/100 NIC it was.
System => properties => device manager => network adaptors
Ahh .... Problem solved.
It's one of those Intel network cards that happen to be made by a different company, A-Open in this case. And also happens to have a Realtech 8139 bloody chip in it.Quite the most unusual Intel network card I have ever seen.
It was at this point that I remembered that I put the Intel NIC in the other K6-III machine, the tech server, and that this one has, and always has had, a Realtek card.
Two minutes later, I had dropped the Realtech drivers onto a floppy, installed them, rebooted ... and there you go.
Who sez I can't fix my own networks?