Heh! Sounds too obvious, but as my linux experience is superficial and windows prior to w10 would be confused by such a drastic hardware change that this step didn't even occur to me as an option.
Although it could pose somewhat of a challenge, as the drive is some 160GB *IDE* drive (is that too slow for the overall task per se, or ok? It's what I had left over
), and I'd need another PC with IDE (need to look, not sure).
What I would have tried is to buy new DVDs, install winXP * on the machine in question , burn linuxCNC boot image from USB stick with that very PC's own DVD-writer, and hope that it could boot properly from its own produce
Your suggested way sounds like a higher chance of success, although also slightly messier, involving re-gutting another PC. Let's see.
Btw., the mainboard is this:
www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/ALiveNF6G-VSTA/
And then I have some cheap Radeon 9550, let's see how well that works. Probably better than with on-board gfx & shared memory (-> delays?).
Anway, thanks for your hints. And sorry if any frustration leaks from my comments, it's sometimes hard to hide
I didn't expect this stuff to act up at this stage already.
I still don't understand why the setup is looking for "cdrom" at all, though.
By the way what is the PWM rate that can realistically be done via this LPT real-time kernel scheme? I saw somewhere 50kHz at most, but not sure I remember that or the context properly. The motors which came with my chinese 6040 CNC were spec'd at 200 kHz I believe. While I have some basic electronics knowledge, I'm not quite a motor expert, I don't understand whether this is a disadvantage or problem.
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* wanted that anyway as dual boot. After actually assembling the China CNC 6040, I can check the basic functrions using Mach3 demo, I guess. Best before I can no longer return stuff in case of problems, I have this lying around for a couple weeks already and not much time
