Options on testing LinuxCNC

I have an early 90's Acer Power Tower 9100T computer collecting dust and thought I would try to use it for experimenting with Linux and LinuxCNC. The BIOS is dated 1993 and it does not recognize CD-ROM drives and is limited to 504M hard drives. I wanted to run the LinuxCNC CD to test the latency of the board but it has not been easy. It is a pentium III but I am not sure what the clock speed is.

The original CD-ROM Drive that was in the machine would not recognize CD-R disks so I had to add a newer drive. I ran into all kinds of issues trying to get the board to recognize the newer drive but through trial and error (and a little help from another site) I got the right drivers and cofigured the drive for the interface board I was using. I know have a working CD drive that can read the LinuxCNC Disk.

So I boot up the machine in Dos and try to start the menu on the CD which of course comes back and tells me it will not run under DOS. I assume that this means I have to boot from the CD in order to get LinuxCNC to work. Now I am back working on the limitations of the original BIOS, it does not see the CD until dos runs so I can not boot from it. I found the SBM.BIN on the cd and read about the boot manager. I made a Boot DIsk (has a 3.5" floppy) and tried again. Still isn't going to work because the bios does not recognize the CD until I load the Driver in DOS.

So, it looks like I may have to give up on the idea of testing the latency before installing LinuxCNC on my hard drive. Anyone else have any ideas before I go down that path???

Thanks,
Greg

I would not bother , just too darned old ! and as John says a time looser !

Time sink? Yes and no. It is turning out that it won't work but I did wake up some old skills. I started working for IBM in 1982 and did a lot of work on those early PCs in DOS. I remember when you had to know the hardware inside and out in order to set up a machine to do test control in the lab. Even built a few of my fist machines.

I left IBM in the early 90's and went into a completely different kind of work and never did get into the guts of any machine past the 486. With that said, this machine is a non starter for Linux but I got to dust off my DOS skills and proved to myself that I can still find my way around the hardware if I want to. I did get the cd to run but found out that I don't have enough memory. Oh well, another one for the trash pile but I have 2 more to try.

If it's from 1993 that has to be a Pentium 1!
Possibly running at a blazing 66 MHz!
(well unless its a 486)

On the bright side, the CPU is worth a few bucks because of its gold content...

Linuxcnc won't run on something that old. but if you have your hart set on using this pc to run a cnc there were some old DOS programs that can do step generation. The ones I am familiar with were not open source, require a hardware key and are no longer supported by their vendors. (and this brings us back to why I started using Linuxcnc in the first place.)

Yes, it did turn out that it will not work but I learn a little bit more every time I try something new. I just read that some of the older hardware worked better than some of the newer hardware does. Guess I went too far back. Thank you for your help. I have a couple of newer machines that I can rob including a known Pentium III.

Greg

Duplicate post, sorry.