Hello all. This is part 3 of my story of getting a Dell Dimension XPS H266 up and running again. I've actually taken the two 60mm fans out as i needed to put them in my main computer and i don't really think they where doing that much good seeing as the case has fairly small holes in the front. Unfortunately this older hardware doesn't have readable temperature sensors so i don't know what sort of temp it's running at. It doesn't seem to get that hot anyway.
Next thing i decided to do was put the original CD-ROM drive that came with it back in along side the CD/DVD drive i'd put in there before so it could have two optical drives. This tower PC has two 5.25-inch bays so this was fairly simple. now it have the two optical drives on the secondary IDE channel and the hard drive and zip drive on the primary IDE channel.
This PC also has three 3.5-inch bays that holds the floppy drive and the zip drive leaving one empty. Now i had a spare floppy drive from another PC that didn't work (A Dell Dimension 486/33) so i thought to my self perhaps i could add another floppy drive to the XPS H266. so i took the drive bay cage out and took the front cover of the empty 3.5-inch bay only to discover there was a metal plate behind it. It was connected at three points so i just bent it backwards and forwards and it came off. I then slid the floppy drive into the empty 3.5-inch bay, put the screws in and put the drive bay cage back into the PC.
At this point i realised the power supply only had one floppy drive power connector so a quick search on Google later and decided i needed a 4 pin molex to 4 pin floppy power connector. Managed to find a cheap one on eBay. got it a few days ago, hooked it up and now i have no spare molex connectors in this PC.
The floppy cable i'm using is from the same computer as the second floppy drive however i did run into a bit of a problem when it came to hooking the cable up to the two floppy drives. On the two floppy connectors on the cable there was a small bit of plastic on one side probably to stop you from putting the cable in the wrong way round. However with these particular floppy drives and this cable i needed to put the connector in the opposite way round. on the older drive it wasn't a problem but on the drive that came with this PC it was a bit trickier. You see it had a plastic shroud around the connector pins so the cable connector wouldn't go in. After a few minutes i decided to get rid of the little bit of plastic on the cable connector. Out came a metal file and a few minutes later i had the little plastic bit low enough to fit.
With all the cables hooked up i fired it up and made sure everything worked. All drives recognised in BIOS and in Windows 95. Haven't check Debian yet but all the drives should work with it.
And that's the end of this part. Cya next time.
Oh and i'll probably post some updated pictures at some point. May be a while though...
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