[thelist] [OT] Bios settings for old boxes

Paul Bennett paul at teltest.com
Wed Feb 12 15:55:01 CST 2003


This is off topic but (1) The people on this list are knowledgable
enought po point me in the right direction, and (2) a tip follows
I have 2 old boxes donated to me, both without cd-rom drives, and one
without a hard drive. Both are pentium 1's and I want to put together a
linux box to muck around with from components of the two. Put together I
have a box with a p1 processor, 1.2 gb hard drive, floppy and a cd-rom
drive that I can't locate the drivers for (it is a sony drive that
apparently needs proprietary drivers in order to run)!!
I can't even run fdisk to partition and format the drives, as neither of
the boxes recognises the floppy drive in the boot process. And of course
neither box can "see" the cd-rom drive without the drivers for it.
So:
(1) How do you alter boot order settings? I can get to the system setup
program, but that doesn't seem to alter the boot order (or anything for
that matter)
(2) What can I do to find drivers for a Sony CDU33A-01 cd rom (from
1994). I have googled away, but a lot of the links are no longer relevant.
(3) Is this worth the hassle? I would hate to throw this stuff away, and
am too poor to really afford to buy another box, but am I beating my
head against a brick wall for nothing?
any help / links / pointers / general mentoring appreciated

<tip type="php- returning arrays from functions">
if you want a function to return more than just "true" or "false", you
 can put variables into an array and return the array:
eg:
if(query fails)
    {
    $error = mysql_error();
    $response["error"] = "error in  query : $sql_query_string :".$error."";
    return $response;
    }

This way you can get more descriptive debug or response messages from
your functions. After this you can simply test :
eg:
$result = callMyFunction($bill, $sue);
if($result["error"])
    { echo "database error - administrator has been notified";  }
elseif($result["empty"])
    { echo "there were no matches";  }
else
    {  echo $result["match"]; }

</tip>

--
Paul Bennett
Internet Developer
Teltest Electronic Design
--------------------------
Phone : 64 4 237 0767
Web : http://www.teltest.com
Wap : http://wap.teltest.com
Email : paul at teltest.com
--------------------------





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