dc7600 Stage I

Some months ago, I was trying to force BeOS, or some derivative thereof, on to a somewhat too new for it HP xw4600 workstation

It didn't work.

Having since dug up some PS/2 peripherals, I've now tried again using a HP dc7600 19" tower - not really high enough spec to call it a workstation, but a business machine none the less. 

This came to market in Q2 2005, rather later than Be stopped providing driver updates but well within the community support era.

Specs are, as obtained:

Pentium D (P4 Dualcore) 2.8Ghz
512MB DDR2
40GB Maxtor SATA hard drive (I think this is a transfer from an older, failed PC it replaced - I'm also surprised to see SATA that small!)
Soundblaster Audigy SE PCI sound card
Onboard Broadcom 5751 gigabit network card
8x USB2 ports (6 rear, 2 front)
Intel HDA audio
DVD-ROM (no burner - rare in 2005 but businesses often specced these out for data loss reasons)
PS/2 ports
Serial port
Parallel port

Out of the box, well, after telling the BIOS to ignore the hard drive as a boot entry as it was otherwise ignoring the boot order, R5 Pro boots. In greyscale. But with working PS/2 keyboard and mouse.

Installing - to a new 128GB SATA SSD - and setting the vesa settings file gives 1600x1200 16 bit colour

However, when checking IDs to look for drivers, the onboard NIC was not showing in Devices. This is a problem on some newer (as in 16-20 year old!) PCs that I've never seen a specific fix for. It has its own IRQ set in the BIOS, but simply doesn't appear.

A PCI Express card with the exact same chipset was dug out of my parts bin and works, with the net_server version of Nathan Whitehorn's 57xx driver.

The soundcard, despite saying Audigy, does not use the EMU10K1/2 chipset family and does not have a driver - even in Haiku I think. Annoyingly, I've got a stack of these and they make up most of my parts bin; along with Digigram pro audio cards. 

I did, however, have some bargain basement CMedia thing which has a driver - but it doesn't work. Device appears in Media but isn't able to play audio. So no sound, for now.

So, what's next?

I need to try source the 768/1GB versions of the RAM limiting bootloader to see if I can get beyond the 512MB - the machine supports, and I have, 4GB of RAM which I may want for Zeta/Haiku/whatever

I may get a Matrox G550 - reasonably powerful 2D card with good BeOS drivers - to avoid using VESA. Most other cards with good BeOS drivers are rare as hens teeth with PCI Express and this board has no AGP

I will transfer my BD-RE drive in to get CD and DVD burning, hopefully. It is SATA while the existing DVD-ROM is IDE but there are spare SATA channels and I've used SATA burners on R5 before.

There are some tricks you can do with the HLT instruction to reduce CPU idle and hence fan noise - but the fans are shagged as it is so need to be replaced anyway, Noctua or similar lower noise ones will be sourced.

I'm sure I'll find an Audigy somewhere around - annoyingly I know I've binned some machines with them before in work