The Operating System Installation From Hell.

T

toxic chicken

Distinguished Member
i have a compaq presario 4500, which had windows me on it. then, i decided to put reactos on it instead. i started the computer, and it wouldn't boot. so i finally figured out it was my hard drive. i unplugged it and my paper clip (in place of a missing pin) was gone. instead of going through putting another paper clip back in, i decided to try a different hard drive.

i went out into the shed, and got two drives from an old gateway that has been sitting there for almost three years. a 1gb and a 5gb drive. i put them into my computer, and windows 95 booted.

so i used acronis disk director and got rid of the partitions on those. i booted from the reactos install cd and installed it to the 1gb drive. then i realized both drives were showing up as ~4gb.

after trying various things with the drives, i finally completely removed the 5gb one, and the 1gb one was 1gb again. so i installed it to the 1gb drive, and it wouldn't write to the mbr. on boot, i saw this:

1.jpg


so i tried again, *skips unimportant steps involving broken floppy drives and floppies* putting the bootloader on a floppy and after getting the "loading freeloader" screen, i got this:

2.jpg


i finally decided to stop being lazy about it and fix the missing pin on the original hard drive again, and this time i installed, i got an error involving the network card and hard drive. so i removed the network card and...

3.jpg


it worked fine. when they say, "only replace with compaq spare", they aren't joking. :tongueout:



during this i used the following things other than what is part of the computer now:
4.jpg

1gb hard drive
5gb hard drive
2 broken floppy drives
a cd-rw drive
a network card
 
Is reactOS any good yet? Asin what is the driver support atm (Regarding Kernal Support)

Asin can you install sound, Chipset, GFX and Network.
And what programs have you got to work yet?
I know of the 1KB/s limit atm, im just waiting for them to fix that, once that is fixed i will try ReactOS
 
i haven't tried it much yet.

like i said, i had to remove my network card. and i'll see if audio works once i find some speakers.

i got it working at about 1:30am, made this thread, and fell asleep soon after that.
 
Oh come on!

It's your Compaq's fault, not ReactOS!!!

But that's besides the point - let's say it is.... Do you remember the earlier Vista builds? ReactOS is a treat compared to it!

XcOM, ReactOS is made to work with Windows XP drivers - so if your hardware works on XP it should *theoretically* work on ReactOS too.

Did you read NST's review on ReactOS?
Linky: http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/220
 
it doesn't even attempt to run any programs, my network card drivers aren't detected (win98), the file explorer has problems, and my floppy drive no longer appears to exist.

but when it sits there doing nothing, it looks much prettier than windows me did.

also, the house smells like vicks, but i'm going to assume that's my mom's fault, not the computer's.

yeah, the network card was compaq's fault because it never got to starting the operating system before it gave me the error.

and yes, i read that.
 
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