Keeping the old Compaq Aero running as a lighting controller

A few days after I setup my home automation/lighting controller (FireworX-10 running on a Compaq Aero 4/33c) and wrote the first entry on my setup, the hard drive on the Aero experienced problems. I figured I would write an entry here about it even though it is on some really old technology. One of things that encouraged me to convert my online ‘journal’ on Mustangs and FireworX-10 into a more general blog was an opinion I read from Dan on edbrill.com that it could serve as a “brain dump or artificial memory for knowledge you pick up.” In that light, I thought I would add this here for myself to remember from and possibly others to learn from.

The original hard drive was still in operation on the 12 year old Aero. It was 256 Mbytes in size so it had to be running DriveSpace compression in order to fit everything. It was DriveSpace that began reporting problems. Rather than try to fix the problems, I decided to rebuild the thing from scratch. Luckily, I found that I had a 6 Gbyte IBM Travelstar drive lying around and it fit in nicely.

It took a couple of reboots to get it to recognize the new drive. There were a few minutes where I couldn’t even get it to power on with the new drive. I was able to get it to recognize it by removing the drive from the BIOS settings and unplugging and reinstalling the drive. Unfortunately, I didn’t write this immediately after I did it so I don’t remember the exact sequence of steps. The important thing is that I got it to work and was able to install the setup and diagnostics software.

The challenge with loading an operating system on this little machine is that it comes with an external floppy drive that plugs into the single PC Card slot which is the same slot that the network card uses. Also, it has no CD-ROM drive. Since the newest Windows OS it can run is Windows 95, I needed to get DOS on it first. I used to work with these laptops in a desktop support role and at the time I had plenty of boot disks with correct drivers and so on. Now I have nothing since I bought this unit used on ebay. Of course, I own licenses for DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 from a long ago PC purchase so I just needed the media. I found the web site bootdisk.com had what I needed to generate a DOS 6.22 boot disk.

After installing the hard drive, I booted from the floppy and I partitioned and formatted it. I then needed to get it on the network. I have an old 3COM Etherlink 3C589 for it. Again, hardware but no drivers. In order to do get it working, I found MODBOOT a ‘Modular Boot Disk’ solution. I built the standard MODBOOT disk and then made the network version of it with the driver for my network adapter. Since I could not boot from the floppy onto the network (due to the single PC Card slot), I copied the MODBOOT disks contents to the c: drive maintaining the file folder structure. After several attempts (I found that I could not allow EMM to be running) I was then able to boot the laptop and get it on the network. I then copied the contents of the Windows 95 CD across the network to the hard drive of the laptop and installed it from there.

The Aero is not a perfect solution since I cannot remotely control it via VNS so I hope to replace it with something a little more advanced in the future. I definitely need a small footprint solution and the Shuttle PC looks interesting. I have seen some older ones on ebay. A Pentium III with Windows 2000 should be quite enough for my needs. For now though, the Aero seems to be working fine.