install card

hawat.thufir_at_gmail.com
Date: 11/23/05 

Date: 22 Nov 2005 19:23:30 -0800

I have an older computer which is an IBM personal computer 300 GL
desktop. This computer, named geidiprime, is a pentium II and has two
NIC's: 3com and D-Link.

This computer came to me with the 3com NIC in "slot A." I took the
3com NIC out and put the D-Link NIC into "slot A" and then the 3com NIC
into "slot B" (because I was having trouble fitting the D-Link NIC into
"slot B"). I also removed the battery because the BIOS was password
protected and I didn't have the password.

A second computer, caladan, is also a 300 GL. Caladan, however, has a
celeron processor and a crappy hard drive which has totally failed
(somethings broken, I assume the hard drive). Caladan's floppy drive
works fine, so I put tomsrtbt on there and was able to ping Caladan
from a different computer (arrakis), so I *know* that Caladan's NIC
works fine.

I need to canabalize caladan and geidiprime for at least a gateway,
hopefully I can also get a live-cd terminal computer also. For
esoteric reasons the gateway mus run windows (please don't ask), so
needs a hard drive for that purpose.

I don't know how to approach this and am concerned that I broke
geidiprime, so I'm hesitant to even switch some NIC's around. This is
the first time I've done anything like this, and swapping hard drives
sounds challenging, to say the least. Buying an el-cheapo used hard
drive is one thing, installing it is another. On a computer like this
the idea of paying someone for that seems a bit backwards.

Any suggestions as to how to approach this?

thanks,

Thufir