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Compaq Portable II 286

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First post, by DeafPK

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So this is a computer I actually bought. It came untested and the first thing I did was pulling it apart and checking out the CMOS battery and power supply. Also there was a little dust in there that was gently asked to leave the premises. I bought and replaced the lithium 3.6v battery - no leakage at all from the old one and a brand spankin' new one was in stock at the local hardware shop. So the quest began to give life back to this dude, which is older than me!

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I used my "Frankenstein" Pentium MMX with 5.25" floppy drive to produce a setup disk which was found after a quick googleing. The Compaq's floppy drive would not cooperate however.

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The quick solution was to just use the same Chinon drive and it is magnificent.

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Good, good

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The light and color of this screen is far from what the camera can percieve. It looks more like the green color of the Spotify logo. The coolest thing was when I had shut down the computer and turned off the lights in the room ... I am not kidding the picture was glowing ghostly for several minutes, text still readable... never seen anything like it before.

After saving the config, the computer booted straight off the hard drive into DOS 3.31. It complains about missing .sys files but eventually gets there. The previous user was last on this machine in 1996. Quite the time machine! Sadly the file structure is a total mess. I would need super duper EGA mode to fit the listing of dir/w ...

It also had Windows 3.0 installed. I took on the challenge of turning cats into cheese - childhood flashback right there.

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The specs!

- 286 8MHz
- 4096 kB ram
- EGA video card, can possibly do CGA and other tricks
- 21 MB Winchester harddisk
- 360k floppy drive that seems faulty
- and that awesome green CRT

Furter, I took it apart more to check out the drives and I tried to clean the floppy drive's heads. Still doesn't work though.

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Must be the slimmest 5,25" drive I've seen, just thinking this is 1986 is impressive. It doesn't have a belt drive, the motor is fixed under-center like on later floppy drives.

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This guy has lived in this machine, possibly been hitting the road many times, and it just works.

What I want to do next:
- Try to get it to run with a 3,5" floppy drive, hopefully 1.44 MB
- Either run some deep format on the hard drive and install a fresh new DOS 3.31 or perhaps tinker and fix the existing install
- Establish some way of file sharing back and forth using a COM port or perhaps filling that last ISA slot with a NIC
- Games!!
- External monitor - I have a Commodore 1084 monitor that I believe can do EGA
- Otherwise getting to learn a lot more about the 286, EGA, EMS etc.

"an occasional fart in their general direction would provide more than enough cooling" —PCBONEZ

Reply 1 of 4, by DeafPK

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Update:

I have briefly tried to get a 1.44 floppy drive to work, but it seems it is incompatible. I have not tried with a 720k drive I have, as that drive is untested on a good system.

I have read and learned a lot more about the hard drive in this machine. The controller card reads "WINCH" at the 40-pin header where a cable that looks just like an IDE cable goes to the drive. I thought this was something called a Winchester drive and that it had more in common with ST506 type drives. It turns out this is in fact one of the very first IDE drives as a result of Compaq and other manufacturers creating that standard in the 1985/86 time period.

I have a copy (hard copy, physical!) of Mark Minasi's "PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide", eighth edition. It says a thing and two about these drives in particular. If you try to low-level format it like you would be used to for maintaining your ESDI or ST506 drive, you would end up destroying the IDE drive.

So then the path became a lot easier, I plugged the drive to a Triton motherboard I'm working on, went to BIOS, turned off everything fancy and set the drive type manually to "Type 2". Now I could boot a floppy and access the drive. This means I can install DOS fresh and nice to the hard drive and put it back in the Compaq when I'm done. Life just got ten times easier 😀

"an occasional fart in their general direction would provide more than enough cooling" —PCBONEZ

Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

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Congratulations! Cool machine! I really love these portables, too! 😁
Once had a Compaq Portable 486c/66 and a Siemens Portable (pic)..

Yours is powerful enough to run Win 3.0 MME and Win 3.1 even.
If you add a soundcard with IDE, you can even use a CF reader w/ slot mounting.

Here's a driver which allows you to use secondary IDE on 286 and onwards.
I tested it myself in a pizza box 286 with IDE drive and an ESS soundcard (+CF or DOM).

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"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 3 of 4, by DeafPK

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Glad you like! I didn't know Siemens had such portables. It looks cool, almost like some medical equipment.

Thanks for the tip on the CF, that would be a very neat solution for file management! I do have an ESS audiodrive with IDE, but the only free slot in the Compaq is an 8-bit slot. I will perhaps use that trick for a later build sometime.

A while back I bought a bundle of four WD 8003e network cards, coax cables and two hubs with coax and RJ45. I am thinking about installing a card in the Compaq and try setting up a network for file sharing between some various old computers. I just need to educate myself a little more on the how-to.

"an occasional fart in their general direction would provide more than enough cooling" —PCBONEZ

Reply 4 of 4, by tizzdizz

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Nice portable! I've never used one before, but am intrigued by the all-in-one design. Hopefully you're able to get it working how you want. Any progress?

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