Remember when I said that I installed NetBIOS temporarily and the boot process moved the DHCP server call further up in the boot process? Well, when I went to try removing and then restoring the RTL8111 adapter, the PC no longer boots. It just hangs at the point where it used to try to hit the DHCP server. I tried booting it from the CD, and if I choose boot from hard disk, it hangs as well, but this time it give me an error, a crash with register values and all from PROTMAN. Booting to maintenance does not seem to give me access to the C drive,so I can't restore my backups of PROTOCOL.INI, the MMRE driver files and CONFIG.SYS. I booted from a linux stick which recognizes the JFS drive, but throws a bad superblock error if I try to mount it. It's an older kernel, though, so I'll try again with a modern one.
A few questions: if I boot from the CD ROM in install mode, configure the network card, boot, and then go straight to System Management before starting the install process, should the network be up and running at that point? I could do this, trying different drivers and parameters without wiping my hard drive. Beyond that, is there a way to access the hard drive from the CD or a boot drive? Booting from the CD in maintenance mode only recognizes that a C drive even exists, and will let me switch to it, but the minute I try to do a DIR it throws an error.
Anyway, for now I'm just using my working install in Virtualbox on my main machine (Ubuntu linux), which works well enough (including networking), but it would be nice to have this running on bare hardware. I may keep an eye peeled for a good used older Thinkpad as a host for this.