Well, to try and make a long story short...
I have 3 old computers, a 286, a 386, and a 486, and only one (1) color monitor. The 286 is almost useless except for one quirk: a combo VGA/MDA (hercules monochrome, right?) video card. Lately my neighbor dumped off an old mono monitor he picked up for $2. Well, I figured, why not pull the VGA/MDA card from the 286 and move it to the 386, and hook it up? Win3.1 (what I had on the 386) does monochrome, right? So I did that, and booted DOS- that worked fine. Going into Windows, it didn't work (expected since it was set up for VGA.) So I tried to run setup and switch to monochrome, but I needed my program disks which of course I didn't have. HOWEVER, I did have some WFW 3.11 disks left over from another computer, so I figured why not upgrade? So I ran that setup, but noticed there was no mono card driver. In a moment of stupidity, I tried to continue installation with a VGA driver. Setup failed when it attempted to enter Windows. Finally went to the internet and found the required hercules driver (thanks to this website). Started setup again, loaded driver, setup proceeded correctly. Only probem during installation- Disk 4 had errors preventing the installation of 2 files- one was some email program, the other a file called programs dot something or other... I think that both were noncrucial. After this, I actually SAW windows boot and the setup program add program groups to my Program Manager which already existed (So I know the display works.) Setup completed, and prompted me to restart, which I did. THEN I typed win as usual and windows began to start, except for one strange thing- the startup image had a label I had never seen on the other computer running WFW 3.11 which said "BETA Version." (Don't know if that matters.) Then, the screen went blank, the hard drive worked for a few seconds, and a beep issued from the computer speaker. Nothing else afterward. Tried the same several times. Beats me why it won't boot. One other note- my BIOS says that I have a VGA/EGA/CGA video card installed and whenever I try to change it to monochrome, the change does not save to the BIOS (even though other changes do). Then when I reboot a message comes up along the lines of "BIOS video card conflict edit bios press f1 now." I go in, and the display option shows VGA/EGA/CGA adapter already, so all I do is save and exit and the startup error message goes away. Still I can't boot windows. Any ideas? Sorry for the incredibly long message, but I thought the idea had to be gotten across of the whole story.
P.S. the freewwweb closing is a real shame. I used it on my linux box all the time.
