Chameleon is a project I started last year ..
The object of the excercise was to create a tower with 1GB of ram which would run multiple legacy Operating systems..
I wanted 3 OS to each IDE hard drive ..all windows ...and this proved dificult though not impossible ..
Boot sector restrictions were the main problem ...and avoiding each installation trying to overwrite and upgrade the resident OS .
I finally got it built ..
Win 3.1 win95 Win98SE WinME Win2000 and XP
There is also a CF slot at the front ..on which Linux Mint15 currently resides..
It has a floppy drive ..
A CD/DVD drive
A DDS4 DAT tape drive
..and another drive some of you may know of ..
The drive that never was ..as CD became the norm..
A PD/CD drive ..
This drive takes a CD like media (rewriteable) which is in its own case and is not removeable ..
Preformatted sectors ...and the data appears to last for decades if not forever without decay..
I recently read data stored on a disc in the 80s ..with no sign of degradation..
incredible !!!
X Card by Sigma designs ...and a commodore tape drive hooked to one of the ports for TAP file transfer.
It also sports an Adapted SCSI card ..and is home to a 2gb SCSI hard drive
I call it Chameleon ..because it can change as needed ..
The tricky bit was finding an IDE switch ..which you can see in the photo ..
I had to buy this from the USA ...and was not working ..and had to be fixed before I could use it..
This switch allows push button selection between 2 hard drives ..and the Compact Flash interface/reader ..
Obviously this can't perform a 'HOT' swap and requires booting down before a different OS is initialised ..
Here are a couple of Pix..
The object of the excercise was to create a tower with 1GB of ram which would run multiple legacy Operating systems..
I wanted 3 OS to each IDE hard drive ..all windows ...and this proved dificult though not impossible ..
Boot sector restrictions were the main problem ...and avoiding each installation trying to overwrite and upgrade the resident OS .
I finally got it built ..
Win 3.1 win95 Win98SE WinME Win2000 and XP
There is also a CF slot at the front ..on which Linux Mint15 currently resides..
It has a floppy drive ..
A CD/DVD drive
A DDS4 DAT tape drive
..and another drive some of you may know of ..
The drive that never was ..as CD became the norm..
A PD/CD drive ..
This drive takes a CD like media (rewriteable) which is in its own case and is not removeable ..
Preformatted sectors ...and the data appears to last for decades if not forever without decay..
I recently read data stored on a disc in the 80s ..with no sign of degradation..
incredible !!!
X Card by Sigma designs ...and a commodore tape drive hooked to one of the ports for TAP file transfer.
It also sports an Adapted SCSI card ..and is home to a 2gb SCSI hard drive
I call it Chameleon ..because it can change as needed ..
The tricky bit was finding an IDE switch ..which you can see in the photo ..
I had to buy this from the USA ...and was not working ..and had to be fixed before I could use it..
This switch allows push button selection between 2 hard drives ..and the Compact Flash interface/reader ..
Obviously this can't perform a 'HOT' swap and requires booting down before a different OS is initialised ..
Here are a couple of Pix..
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