Digital pain

Corbett | January 19, 2004 2:58 PM

We need to appreciate that we no longer have to use Win 98. Here's a shortlist of an entire evening wasted with Win 98, an audio card, a SCSI driver, and an old Pentium 2 280Mhz box.

The mission was simple: I had recorded our band live at a recent Living Room gig. I wanted to make a digital transfer of the recording from my Akai DR16 to my computer using a DAL Digital Only card. This way I could preserve the quality of the Akai's AD convertors, bypassing the PCs terrible soundcard. Once the transfer was made, I'd tweak it a bit in an audio editor, and burn it to CD. Simple stuff.

Now let the pain begin:

1) I pull out a spare box to pop the DAL card in, and to my chagrin realize that the card requires an ISA slot. None of the dozen PCs around the office have an ISA slot. Too old.

2) I remember having kept an old Pentium 2 ATX box somewhere in storage. Locate it, yes, it has 2 x ISA slots!

3) I turn the machine on. Sniff sniff, burning wire smell. Not good. Pop. The power blows.

4) Head down to the computer street and buy a new power source, install it, works. Boot up.

5) Box already has a clean working install of 98. Good.

6) Notice the FDD isn't working. Grab a spare floppy from a box to see if it's the floppy. Nope. Shut down computer. Exchange a working FDD from another box. That doesn't work either. Try a different floppy. Nope. Hmmm. Check all cables. Doesn't work. Reverse all cables. Aha! Works.

7) Start computer again. Turn around to sip cold coffee. Wonder why computer is taking so long to boot. Turn around and see a Linux 9 install loading on the screen. Horror! The blank floppy was a Linux install disk. Shit. Hurry. Turn off.

8) Reboot. Now it only goes to some wierd pre BIOs boot load config. Doesn't detect SCSI HDD anymore. Dig out an old Win 98 boot disk. Try that. Can't boot from floppy or HDD. Should I investigate, waste more time, or just reinstall Win 98? Sip. Sip. Think. Think. Reinstall.

9) Dig through millions of CDs for an old Win 98 disk. None. Call Christian. Yes. He has a copy. But it's in Swedish. Doesn't matter. As long as it works.

10) Drive over to Christian's house, get stuck in Taipei 101 traffic, pick up CD.

11) On way back to office, keep fuming about the Redhat boot disk incident. Stupid terrible luck. Shit fuck damn!

12) Realize that the unit doesn't have a CD to install new disk. Find an old SCSI CD-R, and install. SCSI Bios only detects CDR, no HDD. Unplug CDR, SCSI bios finds HDD. Only one, not both. Great. Can't install until problem is fixed.

13) Comb through BIOS setting to see if Linux boot disk did anything weird. Why is SCSI controller not working? What's this? 3COM BIOS preload program? Why is this loading? Zero in. Isolate problem. Fiddle with program. Try all statistical combinations. Finally trick it into "loading from Novell Network," then from CD, then floppy. No network, so it checks the CD. Boots original Windows 98! Back to step 6.

14) CD still doesn't work, but OS is there, and floppy works. Forget the CD. Onto installing the damned card.

15) ISA slot is partially blocked by weird black thing sticking out of adjacent NIC card. Have to shift cards over to make space. Shift shift. Install ISA card. Ah, remembered that this stupid ISA card needs a dedicated IRQ and 2 dedicated DMAs. Win 98 seems to randomly assign these settings. Lots of crashes and conflicts. Comb through motherboard configurations. Set up ISA slot to be IRQ 5 with DMA 6-7. Reboot.

16) At least 10 instances of Win 98 trying to install my new hardware. Can't find driver for the NIC card which 30 seconds ago worked fine. Go through 10 reboots. Aargh.

17) Search internet for 3Com NIC card driver. Only about 70 different combinations. Find the one I need. Download, try. Doesn't work. Download try another. Doesn't work. Download and try another. Installs. Whew. But no network connection.

18) Reconfigure all network connections. Loopback test. Nope. Network test. Nope. Hmmm. Download and try another driver. Installs. Reset all IPs. Unplug all LAN cables. Replug. Aha! Works. But only one computer can be seen on the Windows 2000 network. Forget it, will use that computer as transfer folder.

19) The one computer disappears.

20) Go through all possible reinstalls of network neighborhood, file sharing, IPX, Netbui, TCP/IP. Still only one computer seen. Seach all others. Nope. Nagging suspicion that DNS is set wrong by internal technicians. Check each machine in office. One machine has wrong DNS set up. That happens to be the only one seen by Win 98. Hmmm. Change it's DNS. Voila. ?? All computers on network are available.

21) Carry box to my desk. Plug Akai DR16 into DAL digital only card. Realize that I need audio software on the DAL box in order to record. Look around office for disks. Remember that the new box's CD doesn't work. Go online, search some Opensource freeware audio program. Install.

22) Press "play" on Akai, "record" on freeware program, and amazing....it actually works.

All this just to get something to work. No wonder people use Macs.

---

Category: Music

---