Upgrading an old HP Vectra
Joseph Kumph
Call me crazy, but I have got my hands on an old HP Vectra RS/20; it is
built so well that I'd like to upgrade it. For the memory, I'm probrably
going to get one of those old memory expansion cards (anybody know about
how those work with linux, BTW?), and the best thing I can do for the
processor, is get one of those clock doubled 386 to 486 chips (it
currently has a 386DX20 and 20mHZ is the max speed--is it possible to
just change a crystal to make board go at, say 33 mHZ?).
My main problem is determining what I am going to do about installing
another hard-drive. I think I'll have to get a ROM BIOS upgrade to do
this, but I have no idea where to find one. There are four places to put
the BIOS on the board. 2 of them are full, and 2 are marked optional.
It's a mycroft / chips BIOS--searching the web led me nowhere. Anybody
have any idea where to find such an old piece? Another possibility is go
SCSI--is it true that a SCSI HD can be put in regardless of the BIOS?
Any other comments appreciated.
Joseph
Ron Houde
I am doing exactly the same thing with a slightly newer machine than yours,
an HP Vectra VL2 4/50 thrown out by my ex-wife's employer Y2K upgrade
program. I am converting it to a Linux (Redhat 6.1) firewall and home
network server.
I so far have boosted the RAM to 40 Meg, replacing the existing 2 Meg EDO
SIMM with an 8 Meg SIMM I had lying around, and a new 32 Meg SIMM.
I bought a Promise Technology EIDEMAX II controller into which I hooked up a
6 Gbytes drive to augment the existing 270 Mbytes drive. I looked around a
while for a second hand EIDE controller card, but at $26 dollars for the
EIDEMAX II, I couldn't justify waiting for who knows how long. Before the
controller worked properly, however, I had to disable the Plug'N'Play mode.
I also added a CD-ROM reader on the machine's primary IDE (FastIDE)
controller.
The machine already was fitted with an SMC Ultra EtherEZ ethernet card, I
added a Netgear ISA Ethernet card and a 6-port 10BaseT Ethernet hub.
I am currently working at bringing the home network up, and then hook the
Vectra as a firewall between the home network and my modem cable hookup.
The experience has been interesting so far. I am learning Linux as I go. I
already knew a little bit of Unix, which has made it somewhat easy to work
with Linux. I am also setting the Gnome user interface uyp and running. My
daughter looks at me strange everytime I type these bizarre hieroglyphs at
the prompt character on the screen. She thinks I should get a life.... <gr>
.
Hoping we can help (if not, at least sympathize) each other.
Regards,
Ronald
gtyre...@hotmail.com
Unless you find a used memory board for that unit laying around
somewhere, it'll be pretty expensive to upgrade it. Can't help with the
BIOS or CPU questions, but yes, you should be able to drop an ISA board
SCSI board into the unit and run a SCSI HDD. I have an old clone XT
that I ran with a 1GB SCCI HDD. :)
In article <3879BCF9...@flashcc.com>,
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Before you buy.
howie
<jku...@flashcc.com> wrote:
> Howdy there,
> Call me crazy, but I have got my hands on an old HP Vectra RS/20;
> it is
> built so well that I'd like to upgrade it.
Well I've got a Vectra 386s/20 (no math coprocessor) sitting underneath
my monitor and sometimes I even fire it up! It has a 850mb (E)IDE hard
drive, that was a hand me down from an upgrade on another computer. It
runs Linux OK and also OS/2 and win3.1, although Xwindows is very slow.
It has 16MB RAM, the max it will recognize. As best as I can remember
I think I had to specify the cyls/heads/sectors/precomp etc. in bios
(Phoenix) setup. This info can be obtained from the hard drive
manufacturers web site. If there is a hole in the IDE cable chuck it!
That was a way of IDing drives back in the dark ages. I also put an
old Sony CD player, a no speed (1 speed I guess) and proprietary CD
card in it.
It ain't fast but it's reliable !
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howie
In article <001e6a30...@usw-ex0107-050.remarq.com>, howie
<swillmeist...@juno.com.invalid> wrote:
> In article <3879BCF9...@flashcc.com>, Joseph Kumph
> <jku...@flashcc.com> wrote:
> > Howdy there,
> > Call me crazy, but I have got my hands on an old HP Vectra RS/20;
> > it is
> > built so well that I'd like to upgrade it.
> Well I've got a Vectra 386s/20 (no math coprocessor) sitting
> underneath
> my monitor and sometimes I even fire it up!
BTW it thinks it's 1/15/1900 but who cares? Maybe we ARE crazy !
Mike Ford
> Vectra as a firewall between the home network and my modem cable hookup.
If you just want to do a firewall take a look at the LinuxRouterProject,
does it all on a single floppy, ie no hard drives required. www.lrp.org
works I think