Hello everyone! In this post, I want to share my new computer and my adventures with floppy disks.
My new IBM ThinkCentre A51
I recently purchased an IBM ThinkCentre A51, which comes with the following specs:
- CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.00 GHz
- GPU: Integrated into motherboard
- HDD: 80 GB SATA
It also has a CD-ROM and a floppy drive (3.5 inch). After taking it apart, I discovered that it didn’t have a cable for the floppy drive. But we found one after a few days.
First boot-up
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the computer was not very loud. It had Windows 7 installed, but it was very slow. It took a minute just to boot up and another minute to run anything. But this wasn’t a problem since I didn’t need that operating system anyway.
Installing a new system and CD-ROM issues
I decided to install Slackware 14.2. I inserted the CD, but I wasn’t able to boot from it. The computer kept saying that there was no operating system found. I thought the CD-ROM wasn’t working, so I tried a different CD-ROM that I knew was functional. But I still had the same issue. Then, I tried booting from a USB drive and successfully installed Slackware.
P.S. Later, I found out that the CD-ROM was indeed broken. I don’t know why the other CD-ROM wasn’t working either. It could be because the cdrom has SATA.
How’s using a Pentium 4 now?
I was pleasantly surprised with how well the computer was working. It was fast, and there were no problems with playing music or videos. I originally bought the computer to play around with old systems, but after using it for a while, I decided to make it my secondary main computer. It’s really great, and I plan on using it for a long time to come, of course while also playing with old systems.
My Experience with Floppies
Floppies, floppies, and more floppies!
In this post, I want to share my experience using floppies. My goal was to install Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.05 from floppy disks, so I purchased 55 3.5″ floppies.
I started by checking the floppies and copying any data they contained. Most of them had drivers for different operating systems, including Windows, MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, and boot floppies for Windows 98 SE and Debian 1.2.
After formatting the floppies, I was disappointed to find that only 25 of them worked well. It took me approximately 3 hours and 40 minutes to write data to the floppies.
I finally managed to write SLS to the floppies, but I needed two more floppies for this process. Additionally, I learned about the “–repair” option in fdformat and was able to successfully repair 8 damaged floppies, although they didn’t work perfectly.
I have since ordered 100 more used floppies and am currently waiting for their arrival. I’ve run into some issues with SLS and plan to write about them in a future post once I’ve resolved them.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates on SLS and other systems
—
Please send any comments to unixcat (at) anche (dot) no