my doom computer is busted

[xit-vono]

I have been using this computer for all my doom demos since about 2005, but it has trouble booting. Usually it will automatically reboot before it gets booted up. Sometimes it has a message about a 3rd slave hard drive failure (I forget what it said exactly). Since I want to continue to play doom, and preferably using vanilla, do you have any suggestions?

[Never_Again]

Not much info to go on here, I'm afraid. Is the system set up to boot into Win98 via that 3rd slave? Does it get to the Windoze startup screen or does it reboot before that?

You might want to go into BIOS Setup and enable the POST screen (in case it's hidden by default by an OEM logo as it often is) and "Halt on all errors" (or a similar option, if available) and write down any errors reported by BIOS.

Relevant HW specs would not hurt either: mobo, CPU, memory, IDE setup details and the boot sequence.

You may want to try to move the suspect HDD to another system and run some diagnostics on it. The manufacturer's website will usually the appropriate tools or you can Google for some freeware. If you need data recovery PM me, I have an old but good prog for that lying around.

[xit-vono]

To be honest I'm not really very familiar about these things. It usually reboots right away. It's a fairly old computer that was set up with a drive that can boot to win98. There's a couple of demos that I've recorded but not uploaded anywhere, but if I lose them it's no big deal because I already have the record there, and I could probably do it over anyways. I think just an improvement to tn02 and rn04. Probably I should just get a new computer anyways.

[40oz]

I have a cheap "nothing special" computer I use pretty much exclusively for playing doom and recording demos. I also keep my ipod music library on there and a copy of slumped and wadauthor to look at wads with.

I forget what the specs are exactly but its a dell inspiron 4200, single core processor, 80gb hard drive, windows XP. Its been really good to me except there's a bit of a wait when loading maps with over 10,000 monsters in them. It cost me about $60 with shipping on eBay, and that was about 3 years ago. Something like that can get you by for a while if you're like me and playing doom is all you do.

[Superluigieth1]

Oh noes! You could try what 40oz is saying...

[xit-vono]

Would I be able to use vanilla doom with it? I remember it took a bit of work with Vince to get my computer set up with win98. Alternatively I may be able to use DOSbox. Is that a good option?

[kunkun]

At least in my experience all versions of dosbox have slight but noticable input lag. Very annoying, feels slightly like "ice physics" or something. Especially with older dosbox versions I also got frame and input drops all the time, newer versions are much better though.

[Searcher]

Dual Boot? xp/98 some people do that. Myk, I think, has one set up like that.

[fx02]

Something like this should help you: http://goo.gl/vvjD4z