i'm going to have to download something.

while i'm at it, let's write down that i need drivers for a kingston etherrx kne20plug and play isa adapter.

no, it didn't take it.

i've got the card out in my hand and let's get the exact device name, here - ati rage theatre 213rt1zua32 / aiw128 agp 53401.

and, let's try again.

if not, i'll have to download something.

this thing has an ati all in wonder in it, which was a high end video card at the time. i can plug a cable line directly into it, and used to use it to watch tv sometimes. i hardly want to pay for cable in 2021, but i could conceivably do that if i really wanted to.

the 98 disc doesn't have the drivers, but the xp disc does.

let me try that, maybe it's that easy.

yeah - the exact thing i wanted to install has been installed, and it works great.

perfect.

now, i need to get the display driver updated....

yeah. the driver works. i just need to install it manually from the disc.

ok.

let's try to get the software running.

ok, wait. i think i might have got it.

i'm so used to windows doing everything for me that i forgot that you used to have to tell it where to look. remember that? maybe you really don't. but, there was a time when you had to tell windows that a sound card was a sound card, what company manufactured it, etc - and hope it installed the right thing.

it's rebooting, and it might work when it comes up.

the software bundle on the iso is something very much like what i remember from years ago, so i'm going to stick with it.

let's see if i can wipe the thing out of the registry entirely and try to just install the drivers, first.

yeah, i'm not getting the drivers to install at all. so, the software installs, but then it tells me it doesn't have a device to utilize. i need to get more specific 98 drivers, first.

let's get the chronology right.

this device was manufactured in 1998. i received it as a gift in late 1999 - around christmas of that year (my 19th birthday was the second week of 2000). the drivers are dated to may, 2000.

so, this is not the version of the drivers or software that came with the device, but would probably be the last version for a 9x architecture and possibly intended for windows 2000 sp1.

let's see what happens when i install from disc. but, i may be stuck:

1) it may be too new for 98

2) it may be too old for xp

so, can i find a different os? or can i find a different iso? i was lucky to find this one...

what i'm trying to avoid, i think, is the ntvdm. i've got these separated in my mind as "9x is 16-bit, nt is 32 bit" but that's not quite right, of course. it has to do with the underlying treatment of dos. this was a long time ago...

so, i want the last version of windows before that, which may have been 2000 sp 1?

let me try in 98 from the disc.

or was it windows 2000?

lol.

i don't remember...

i'm going to have a try a few, though. it's why i'm doing this.

if i can't get 98 to work, i'll need to try me,  somehow. i want a 16-bit os on here...

i neither have me nor nt 4.0 kicking around - i have 98, and i have xp. 

i think i was actually running me.

i got a nap in. it was inevitable.

the bluescreen i'm getting in xp is a driver_irql_not_less_or_equal which is consistent with the idea that the drivers don't work right in xp. but, when i try to install in 98, i'm getting a host of missing files errors. 

given that the disk is dated to may, 2000 it was almost certainly intended for a 9x application rather than an nt appliction. at the time, nt was still mostly used for servers. 9x was the consumer grade product. so, why isn't it installing correctly, then?

i'm going to actually burn a cd and try to install it from there. it's almost done. and, it's useful to have as backup.

i'm not tired, clearly.

thankfully.

finally.

i want to flip these dates over though because i have the electrical to worry about.

fri night--->mon morn: working on the discography (starting at period 3)

mon morn--->thurs night: moving forward through the blogs (starting in 2013)

thus night---> fri night: the alter-reality (starting in 1989)

i just copied the files over, but i may have to actually burn a cd.

so, it crashed with a blue screen error. is that what it did before? i don't remember. 

i want to reinstall to this drive to see if the script works after the permissions shift, regardless...

the files are dated to the year 2000 - this is before xp was released. there's two options:

ctrun_95.dll

ctrun_nt.dll

it's really, really old.

i'm going to launch it in 98 and see if it's more stable. and, i think that's really the better idea, even if i can get it to almost work in xp.

i'm better off buying a second front-end for the audigy and putting that in the newer machine, as it's intended for xp.

ok.

i got excited there, but i think it's a false start. let me do what i intended to do.

well...

it installed.

it loaded.

it crashed....

gah. if this loads, i want it in the other machine. surely.

i actually think this is a good time to take a nap.

my script didn't launch. i think it was a permissions issue, but i don't know, really.

the card in the machine when i built the last script was an audigy, but i've replaced it with the old live drive! and i'm running the install disc i downloaded, on xp. it seems to be working, oddly enough.

so, what was the problem, really? was it that i lost the disc? did i find it now? i'm remembering all of these old programs...

we'll see if it works on xp or not. if it does, that's something i was never able to figure out before. but, it could be as simple as the source. i mean, if i just downloaded the 32-bit software bundle that i could never find before...

there are other 16-bit software programs that don't work in 32 bit. but, i wonder if i want to reverse the logic, if this actually works - do i want it connected to the faster machine?

it's finally manageable in here. sort of. i need to run the shower every few hours to push the smoke back out through the doors, or i'm going to be hacking and wheezing. it's truly utterly disgusting...

if he'd turn the fucking heat on, i wouldn't have to do that.

i have to hope this isn't permanent in terms of severity. but, it's at least not seeping in through the window. one thing at a time.

i'm almost done the install, but these old systems are finnicky and i had to try a few things. i thought i could just load windows 98 to a fat32 partition and let boot.ini deal with it, but it wouldn't do it. so, i had to copy the files on the drive off to a usb key in the win pe environment (from a vista disc), remove all the partitions, boot from a windows 98 floppy boot disk (which i somewhat amazingly actually still have), create a new partition with fdisk and install 98 to it. and, i got it up and running - only to realize i didn't have any drivers, and am hardly going to connect to the internet (with windows 98) looking for them.  so, i tried to plug a usb key in, but that's no good - i don't have a usb key small enough for windows 98 to read. short of burning cds, the only other solution is to create a "swap disk", install xp and drop the drivers in that way. which i was going to need to do anyways...

this old pIII 500 machine, in an asus p3bf board, was built for windows 98. at the time, i had 512 mb of ram, which was impressive. this is the machine i used to record everything up until about 2006 - all the inri stuff, all the rabit stuff, all the deny everything stuff, most of the trivial group stuff and even a bunch of stuff i haven't finished yet (which is why i'm rebuilding it in it's old state) - although it was almost all remastered and remixed on the new system from 2014-2017. i upgraded from 98 to xp in 2004 to install matlab for a course in wavelet design. the machine was never the same after that, and i bought a new machine altogether in 2006...

after that, the pIII became a glorified typewriter and i built an image for it in 2008 that was intended for that purpose. this image was full of word processors and freeware math software, much of it initially written for linux before being ported to xp. i spent a lot of time writing mathml reports on it. but, i also used it for email and internet debates. 

when i moved to windsor, that purpose was taken over by a laptop, and i converted it into a multimedia pc, intended to exist in the living room. i built a second image for that purpose, that was a little more focused on multimedia applications.

i want the new image to be a union of these two images and may end up building a new image for it in the long run, if frequent reinstalls become necessary. for now, i'm going to start with the image i built in 2014 and see if i can just tweak the scripts a little to get the new drivers in.

xp doesn't let you create partitions on the install screen, so i booted into gparted and created two ntfs partitions for the xp install (an os partition and a partition for the script) and a swap partition to get data back and forth. but, when i came up to the install, i noticed that it labeled the partition i want to install to "d:". i decided that this may screw the install up, but i could relabel the partitions when it was done and just do it again.

unfortunately, it wouldn't let me relabel the boot partition. well, i know i can fix it manually if i have to, but why bother? i then remembered that the trick is to set the 98 partition to hidden during the xp install, to make the xp install process only see the partitions it needs to see, namely the os partition and the script partition. this works because now xp and 98 both see themselves as "c:\". the trick, then, is building the boot menu, afterwards. 

so, i went back and did it again:

0. to do this you need a live rescue disc (win pe or gparted), a 98 cd, a 98 floppy and an xp cd.

1. delete all partitions in gparted (or win pe, if you need to copy files first)

2. make sure you have your 98 boot floppy along with your boot cd, and boot to the floppy

3. create the fat 32 partition in fdisk and reboot to the cd

4. finish installing 98 to the fat32 partition

5. boot into gparted and create the ntfs partition for xp, along with whatever other partitions you want. set the 98 partition to hidden and the xp partition to boot.

6. boot into the xp install and carry through with it, whatever that means to you. for me, i have an unattended dvd installation...

7. boot back into gparted and unhide the 98 partition.

there's two approaches from this point.

1. you could just set one or the other as bootable with gparted whenever you want to use it. when you boot into 98, it won't see the xp drive at all because it's ntfs. when you boot into xp, it will see the 98 drive as just files. that's the tactic i'm going to use for now.

2. if you want a boot menu, you need to install a non-windows os to a third partition. so, you could set up a dummy ubuntu install, for example. i'm not doing that right now.

you can't do this using boot.ini without getting stuck with a d:\windows, and i'd advise against that.