networking a p166 system

Smithers

hey all ,
tinkering about with a old 166 system , 40 mb mem , 4 gig ,
have win 98 on it ,

trying to install a 10/100 netowrk card in it , have tried two of em and they just wont install properly ,
in both occasions it wont find the drivers properly , thus wont install the card properly ,
tried it on a pII system and both cards installed no probs , also running win 98 ,

Anyone got any ideas? Corrupt OS?
Or mabye 100 Mhz card on a 66Mhz board? (if that makes sence!)

any help grateful
Smithers

BoB_BoT

are you using isa or pci network cards?

Mixie

Smithers, I have a P166mmx here and can't install 10/100 cards in it. From talking to manufacturer tech support its the 66mhz board thats the problem.

The old 3com 10mbit BNC card I have in it works fine though. AFAIK Marx computers sells suitable cards.

Smithers

Leggo -its PCI ,

Mixie , did u get one , can u reccomend one?

do i have to look for a 66mhz card?

Mixie

Smithers, I was trying to upgrade my network at the time - I was already on 10mbit BNC... I've had those cards for 4/5 years now, they are *that* old. They weren't specifically marked 66mhz, but since it was 4/5 years ago....

Just took it out of the PC to have a look, and printed on the card was:

EtherLink XL PCI
(C)1998,3com Corp.
3C900B

03-0148-200
REV-A
ea=0050042E6DC9
sn=6SU22E6DC9

AFAIR the Windows driver says the card is the 3C900B-TPC. Being as old as they are I imagine you'll be looking for something similar rather than those specific cards, but they definately work.

Hope that helps.

Smithers

Ebay

This similar/same mixie?

Did u have drivers or did windows auto install?
and what o/s were u using?

Cheers
Smithers

Mixie

You find all kinds of junk on eBay

Yeah thats mine, well, same model number and looks the same at least. To think they cost me £33 IRL each at the time!

As for the drivers, win95 OSR2 and win NT needed driver floppy. I'm not too sure about Win98, but WinME, 2k, XP and various linux distros all have drivers for the card. I never set up the network under beOS so can't say really...

I had some trouble using the card under linux, but managed to fix it. If you plan to use the card under Linux read this.

Smithers

you got any spare!!:)
might try and swagger one from ebay , thanks for the advice anyways

Mixie

No spares I'm afraid as I have a few old PCs networked using these cards

They were sold in Gateway PCs though, and were available to buy from Gateway (pre-installed at least) up until 2/3 years ago so if you know someone who has an old Gateway lying around doing nothing might be no harm to have a look at it for the card as it was the default card given if you wanted any network card IIRC.

Smithers

would i have ne problems if i used an isa card instead?

also if i have no drivers would win 98 install isa for me?

Mixie

I'm afraid I don't know, but if it's drivers you're worried about, you can get them from here.

BoB_BoT

smithers i have a spare 10 mbps lying about somewhere, it's a 3com one, will check in the mornin to see if it fits your requirements, i can more than likely give it to ya 4 free, just have to make sure theyre's one lying about work somewhere. will write back 2morrow

Smithers

Cheers Leg ,


wold sort me out nicely ,

let me know

Smihers

po0k

What are ye shiting on about 66Mhz PCi cards in a P166 system? They're server-grade. Not desktop (yet)


Download the win98SE drivers and it'll isntall.
Or just plonk linux on it

Smithers

both the p166 and the pII machine have win 98 se on them ,

the cards both inststall fine on the pII machine but wont on the p166 , thats the problem

ColinM

Smithers, I really hve to imagine that you have a driver issue going on here and that your problem has nothing to do with the CPU in your machine being a 166MHz. I doubt the card is a 66MHz card (as Syxpak said - only some PCI slots in servers operate at that speed). If this is a network card designed to go into a desktop machine with a PII in it, then it is a 33MHz PCI card. Even though you say both machines have Win98SE on them, I don't think this rules out a software/driver/OS problem. What drivers are you using for the card? Where did you get them? Are they on CD or floppy? Or is windows picking up the new hardware and just prompting for you to insert your Windows 98 CD? If you are using the Win98 CD, your Pentium 166 system may not be copying the drivers from the Win98 CD. Based on the driver database system that exists on the Pentium 166 machine at present, it may be identifying it as the wrong card and copying the wrong drivers, or not copying them at all and just re-using corrupted drivers that are already on the hard disk from a previous aborted or unsuccessful attempt to install the drivers. Try going to Realtek's website and downloading the latest drivers for your exact model (or model family if that is not available) of network card.

At the moment, what have you got listed in device manager under the network adapter category? What components have you got installed in "network" in the control panel?

If there is a hardware issue, the only thing I can think of right now that could arise is that the motherboard in the P166 machine may have PCI 1.0 slots but the card may require v1.1 slots. A BIOS upgrade for the motherboard may fix this. I think the driver issue is the more likely though, to be honest.

If you want to spend any more time trying to figure this out, please give me all the details you can like model of the card, model of your motherboard, and exactly what happens when you try to install the card (any messages that appear - informational, errror, or otherwise).

Cheers,
Colin.

Smithers

Cheers for that colin ,
I installed the same windows cd on both machines , win 98se ,

I am thinking it mightnt have been the cleanest of installs so i am fdisking this p166 system as we speak and will try and install again and post back exact messages,

Cheers for the help
smithers

Smithers

fdisk and reload worked!!
Installed fine without problems ,
Got it connected to the net through the router no probs ,

I have a sony cdrw as the cd drive in the machine , should i be able to use it to record on a system this slow?

The cd rom works fine and is recognised as a sony cdrw , but when i go to record using easy cd creator it says there are no supported cd recorders available , i try and select web-checkup but the url aint found , any ideas?

ColinM

Ok, grand, so it was a software problem then. I doubt you needed to reinstall the OS though! (Also, unless you were having specific HDD issues there's no need to remove/recreate partitions if you want to reinstall the OS. A quick-format will do, and will save you some time.)

Anyway, about this cdwriter - is this the HP 8100 mentioned in the For Sale thread? What recognises it as a cdrw? Does windows recognise it as well as the bios? How does it appear in device manager? Check the settings tab of its properties in device manager and put a tick in the DMA box. Reboot. Check the setting has applied. Check config.sys for any real-mode driver that may be being loaded for cdrom devices. You will want to prevent any real mode driver from starting as this will interfere with the windows protected-mode driver.
Click Start, Run, and type notepad c:\config.sys.
Have a look for any line that looks like Device=cdrom.sys /d:mscd001 (the driver may not be called cdrom.sys and the name after the /d may be different). Type REM, followed by a space, at the beginning of the same line to tell Windows to ignore the line. Save the file and exit notepad. Reboot. See if this has made any difference in Easy CD Creator. Try removing and reinstalling Easy CD Creator if there's no change.

Where did you get the copy of Easy CD Creator you have? What version is it? I am guessing that you may have an old version of Easy CD Creator, and that is why it is not recognising the drive as one it can support. If it came with the HP drive, there is an update on HP's website for the version that shipped with the drive. There's also a firmware update for the drive (but try that last, as you never know if it's going to make junk of your drive or not). You can have a look at the support section for the HP 8100i here.

As for would a cdrw work in your Pentium 166 machine - yeah - it should be fine, especially if it has MMX. I wouldn't try to do anything else on the machine while you are writing a CD though, as writing a CD on your machine will need pretty much full CPU time. Try to have nothing else running in the background as well (do ctrl-alt-del and check that you have only explorer and systray running). You can use the Startup tab of the System Configuration Utility (Start, Run, msconfig) to deselect everything but system-tray. Disable any real-time antivirus scanners while you are writing a CD. Disable your screensaver also. When writing a CD, you may get away with writing data directly from a network share, but it is safer to copy it to the local HDD first.

It would be best to have your HDD connected to the primary IDE connector on your motherboard and the cdwriter connected to the secondary IDE connector on its own.

One last thing about installing Easy CD Creator - don't install "Direct-CD" unless you really, really need it. Direct-CD is for packet-writing to CDs which you format first. This is suposed to make life really handy for you because you can then drag and drop files to the CD like as if it was a large floppy disk. The downsides are that it is flaky and you will usually have problems trying to read it in other drives/machines. Also it is a resource hog because it is running all the time. When you insert a blank disk, it will ask you do you want to format it. If you don't know any better and say ok, when you go to write a disk the proper way, you will be told the disk cannot be written to. In a nutshell, Direct-CD is severely crap.

As an experiment, you could try downloading the trial version of Nero Burning ROM here. Package 1 is all you need. I hope you have access to a fast net connection though as it's nearly 21MB.

Ok, let me know how you get on so.

Smithers

Alright Colin ,

bois and windows see it as , sony crx215e1 which it is
Clicked the DMA Box as suggested ,

Rebooted , uninstaled easy cd creater 5 ,
rebooted , reinstalled just easy cd creater on its own, tried it again , no good ,

Have everything out of msconfig anyways to save booting up time,
tried the web update this time , updated to version next version up from mine ,
reboted , tried againa nd hey presto it worked ,
Figt grub is being "backed up"" now! ;-)

I am using this machine as pure back up and file sharing , have a 4gig and a 20 gig in it ,
Only other machine i have is a laptop and its been going 24/7 with the introduction of BB and i dont want to burn it out

had an external USB ide case and was a pain hookin it up all the time to burn a cd , now i have this p166 up and running its all its going to be used for ,

Thanks for your help ,
No doubt i will be back in the future!

ColinM

Good man so, Smithers.
Roxio's web servers were down at some point yesterday - this could have been why the web update didn't work - doh!

ColinM

Originally posted by Smithers
Figt grub is being "backed up"" now! ;-)

ps - I was looking at that for a while trying to figure out what it was. Fight Club, right!!

Smithers

Ah , typo!!

was meant to be "Gift Grub"!!

ColinM

Ah yeah - Gift Grub is without doubt the best thing on Irish Radio since Scrap Saturday. If you want to archive the ones they have in the Gift Audio section on the TodayFM website in RealMedia format, you will find this thread from here most useful.

ColinM

Hey Smithers, you asked me a networking question by PM - I tried to send you a response, but your Inbox says it is full. Seeing as the question wasn't in any way personal, and because someone else may bebefit from this, I'm going to post your question and my reply here. Hope you don't mind.

Smithers wrote on 27-07-2003 17:39:
I need help with networking these 2 machines , p166 has win 98 , laptop has win 2k , have shared the folders i want to access ,

win2k machine can access the folder on the win 98 machine,

when i try and access the win2k machine from the win 98 machine it asks for a password , i never set one , is there a generic one?

Appreciate ur help

Smithers

Hi Smithers,
Win98 uses share-level sharing by default, so when the Win2k machine attaches to any shares you've made on the Win98 machine, usernames and passwords are irrelevant because the Win98 machine has shared its resources with anyone (be careful of this if the machine is connected to the net!).
For the Win98 machine to use a resource on the Win2k machine, it has to do this in the context of some username (user-level sharing). What did you log in as on the 98 machine? click start and see if there is an option to "log off" somebody. Who ever you log in as on the 98 machine must have an account on the Win2k machine. You can set this up by right clicking "my computer" on the win2k machine and choosing manage. Go to local users and groups and add a new user. make the user a part of whatever groups you want on the win2k machine that it will allow it to access the resources it needs. Standard and Backup Operator groups are probably the ones you will want to make it be part of.
As an experiment, log in on the win98 machine as administrator, and supply the same password that administrator has on the win2k machine. If it's a blank password, leave it blank (but for security, especially on the net, you're better to have something). Open an explorer window and type in \\<your win2k server name here>\C$ If you can see the C drive on your win2k machine, then IP settings and connectivity are fine.
Cheers,
Colin.

Smithers

Created the new user name on win 2k machine same as win 98 machine ,

when i logged in under this new username , then try and access the machine from win 98 machine , it works , no problems at all ,
Making backup easy peasy!

Fair play Colin , u know ur sh*t!!!

I know where to go for further questions!!

ColinM

No worries Smithers. I always got a kick out of solving problems - plus the praise is nice too!