My current computer just died, I have some questions.

Factual Questions
1

I have two computers. A 3 year old Dell, and a fancy pants custom built (FPCB from here on out) one that I’ve been putting together over the past few months.

The deal was that FPCB would be my new all around workhorse and that old Dell would remain my studio computer, but everything non-music software related would be migrated to FPCB. The main reason old Dell remains the studio computer is because I have a very expensive sound card (actually it’s an audio interface) that will only run under Windows 95 or 98, and FPCB is XP. To top it off, the install had some problems that required workarounds to which the documentation is lost to the sands of time.

So, I go to boot up old Dell the other day and the monitor doesn’t click out of standby (the led stayed yellow), and then system speaker emitted 4 long beeps. 4 long beeps means there’s a problem with the system timer, and generally means that something died on the mobo. I don’t feel like buying a new mobo or dumping any $$$ into old Dell, so it’s time to change my plans and strip it for parts. FPCB is already up and running, there are some additional parts that I need, but I can do my everyday thing on it.

Sorry this took so long but here are my 2 questions.

I have a lot of important stuff I need to get off my 2 hard drives on old Dell. I was thinking I’d remove the current HD from FPCB and temporarily plug the 2 HDs in, burn what I need on to DVD, and then remove the drives. My concern is nuking something when the drives wake up in a completely new surrounding. I imagine it will find a shitload of ‘new hardware’, but other then that are there any pitfalls I should be on the lookout for?

Question 2 - My fancy soundcard options.

The good - Reformat FPCB and make it dual boot XP/98, stick card in, use all my music software under 98
The bad - Reformatting and installing tons of programs and patches. What does XP do when I load it up and it sees the card? Also 98 has problems with more then 512 ram. (I intend to put a gig in) I’ve found that I can limit the amount of physical ram that 98 sees though, so I think I just fixed that.

The good - Go buy a new soundcard! Get the latest stuff and the latest technology.
The bad - My $500 card which was working flawlessly (still does) up until a few days ago is now a paperweight. Also, the $500 for a new card.

The good - If it works under 98 maybe it will work under XP.
The bad - FPCB is running like greased lightening right now, I shouldn’t mess things up by trying to do some wacky install.

Any advice is appreciated.

2

Can’t you just add the old hardrives to the XP machine as slaves and make backups from that point, no need to make it a boot drive to just back up the data you need. You might also consider using a hard drive tray in which you swap hard drives in FCPB computer depending on which OS you want to use versus a dual boot system. I’m thinking then you would not have to re-format the current XP drive. I use that system for Linux and the machine works great. Each drive has its own config and you might be able to disable the 500.00 soundcard in XP when its not needed.

3

Both computers are set up the same in the sense that they are both dual boot with linux. The linux partitions are on the D drive, so the drives need to move around in pairs lest grub won’t boot up. I’ve done it before where I removed the linux drive and had to do a bunch of mumbo jumbo (changing around hd0 or something) to successfully boot into windows though. I figured for now just moving both drives would be the easiest way to go.

How safe is that?

4

Do you have win98 drivers for that DVD burner?

5

How expensive would it be to replace the special sound card with an XP compatible card?

6

what kind of sound card/interface is it that is not supported by xp? I am not questioning that lack of support I am just curious.
As for replacing it, sound blaster makes an awesome sound card (audigy) that also has a multiple input option for serious music making.
Anyway, the hard drives should not be a problem at all to transfer data from is you hook them up on your secondary ide. Regardless of how you do it though there should be no issues of data loss. It will either work or it won’t.
The only real issue that might crop up is if one of the drives uses an overlay program to allow full use of a large drive in a computer that doesn’t recognize large drives (for instance many computers will not recognize a drive over 32 gigs without this overlay).

Now as far as your older computer, are you sure that you don’t just have some memory loose or another card loose in the system?
The kind of problem you describe is not a very common failure without some other incident (like putting in a card or something while the comp is turned on or some similar event to cause the damage. I would check very closely before assuming the motherboard has gone bad. In my experience as a tech a motherboard that is defective will fail pretty rapidly not years or months later.

7

As for getting info from the other hard drives, if you’re worried about fooling with the IDE channels, you could always get a USB drive cage. I bought one for a little over $30 so that my aunt could copy files from her old hard drive to her new dell (she didn’t want to open the case and violate warranties). It’s pretty nice, and easy to use – XP recognizes it natively, so there aren’t any drivers to worry about.

And in searching for a link i see that it’s on sale for $24 now. Damn.

Alternatively, if you want to keep the functionality of another computer, can’t you try and find a motherboard that supports the processor and RAM of the old dell? I imagine that dell uses stock boards made by other manufacturers, you might even be able to find the model they used if you get the part number off the ‘dead’ mobo.

8

Lets see if I have this correct. Each machine has 2 drives C and D with Liux on D. I am not very good at Linux but could you still use the swappable tray for the MS XP 98 drives (which would be C ) and have a drive permanently mounted that contains Linux and would boot no matter which MS OS is in the tray. Also if a replacement card is 500.00 I would think you could build a new machine easy for that amount.
Oh Yeah have you tried checking battery on the Dell?

9

Yes, the DVD burner was originally in old Dell.

10

Well I need a card with at least 8 1/4 inch outputs. Cards with that feature set start at about $500, which is about what I paid for mine years ago.

The card I currently have is a Lexicon Core 2. It’s 24 bit with 4 ins, 8 outs, a breakout box and a PCI card.

11

Take a look at Partition Magic which can resize, move, and even combine partitions. Or just unhook your optical drive(s) temporarily and put the second pair on your secondary IDE channel to copy the data (as stated above).

What is the make and model of your sound card? I’d be surprised if there were no workaround available somewhere to get it to work with XP.

12

This is a great idea.

I’ll check this out, thanks.

13

Well I guess not on the XP compatibility - Googling yields droves of angry customers but no solutions.

14

Howyadoin,

It’s a bummer that Lexicon made an orphan of the Core 2. I almost bought one when i was first shopping, but the giveaway price seemed too good to be true. I learned about Lexicon kicking it to the curb and thought better of it.

Have you given any thought to switching to something like an M-Audio Delta 1010? I’ve got one in my studio and it’s a dream to work with, in fact I’m picking up a second one in a couple of days for 16-in/16-out analog goodness. It has the A/D converters in a breakout box, so it’s super quiet. It’ll do 24-bit/96KHz with no problem, has MIDI and SPDIF, etc. It works great with the direct outs of my board as well as tape ins. Each input and output is individually +4/-10 switchable. You can also get a 8-in, 8-out optical interface for ADAT stuff. Places like 8thstreet.com sell 1010s for around $500, GuitarSpender is probably more like $600.

-Rav

15

P.S. Dell is famous for proprietary power supply connectors. It’s unlikely that a transplanted power supply is going to work. Have you tried unplugging and replacing the video card and RAM? It’s possible that the POST beeps are related to a perceived missing component. Are you sure the beeps are system timer related? Worth a try, if you haven’t already…

-Rav

16

It may or may not be compatable. The card I have is about 4 years old, no longer made or supported, and at the time I bought it, 98 was still pretty much the new kid on the block. I also remember that I had to do some heavy duty tweaking to get the thing to work. This was a common problem that the company provided a laborious work around for. I no longer have the documentation and am unsure if I could successfully reinstall it on a 98 machine let alone one running XP.

**

Funny you mention that as I plan to buy that one as well. However the other card I need is much different from a high end consumer sound card. It’s essentially a audio interface that I use to hook my computer up to outboard devices. I need a lot of plugs on it.

**

This is what I’m leaning towards as well. One other question. My XP is ntfs and 98 is fat32, will that be a prob?

**

I’m going to go straight home and check this out. I’ve been shuttling lots of parts between the two machines and this is certainly possible. I took a look on the inside after it died, but I’ll look again. This may sound stupid but the machine was unplugged for about 2 months, could that factor in with a battery finally dying but no problem because the machine was still plugged in at the time?

17
      • News flash: since XP doesn’t allow hardware mode, it doesn’t run everything as FAST as Win98 and ME did. Software mode drivers always run slower than direct-hardware ones do, and for some hardware, that time lag matters.
        Now then:
  • Check the hardware as noted. The more you have been moving parts around, the more likely it is that something didn’t get pushed in just right.
  • If that fails, I would NOT hook up those FAT32 drives to that WinXP install, at all. XP is supposed to support FAT32 of course, but I have seen more than a few times in situations like this where WinXP does something to “poison” the FAT32 partition that makes it unreadable by Win98 machines ever afterward. So once you hook it up to WinXP, it may not go back to running Win98 at all. I have no cites, just stories I have heard. The safest thing to do is find some way to hook those FAT32 hard drives up as slaves to another computer that is still running Win98 or ME, and copy off what you need that way.
    ~
18

How about ripping out the XP master and linux slave and replacing it with my 98 master and it’s linux slave and burning up dvds?

That way the only thing I need to worry about is my computer finding a a lot of new hardware. Would you reccomend that?

19

Warning: this might be a really, really bad thing to do.

Knowing very well the incompatibilities between NTFS and FAT32, I was recently confronted with a partially smoked W98 hard drive with data that I needed to migrate to my new XP box. Worse, the new box is one of those uber-cool 10,000 rpm SATA drives. Every time I set the old hard drive up as a slave, the system insisted on trying to boot from it, no matter what I did…

…Until I did something which I considered to be very dangerous. I couldn’t afford to have the data professionally recovered, and I needed it right then or not at all. So I booted my new box up and installed the roasted drive while the machine was running. Popped open Explorer and I’ll be damned if it didn’t read the drive and allow me to copy all the data without a single hitch. It even held together long enough for me to reformat the old drive, which I am now using in a secondary system.

I don’t know why it worked, and I certainly can’t recommend doing it, but if you find yourself in a situation where you feel you can afford to lose everything, it might be worth giving it a try.

20

Thanks King, I’ll keep that in mind. BTW from one geek to another, nice move. :stuck_out_tongue: