First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all
This week I got a nice 286 machine from a recycler:
The specs so far:
CPU — unknown. I could not remove the heatsink and I can't load any software on this machine to identify the CPU. I can only say that it's a square ceramic chip, so I guess it's an Intel? Also has an Intel 287-6 FPU
RAM — 1MB socketed on the motherboard
MB — COMPUMATE-SA286/SUNO2-C with a Suntac chipset
Videocard — Prisma EGAMAX 860 with 256 KB of RAM
HDD — MFM drive, 42MB
OS: MS-DOS 6.22
At first try the system didn't boot — the PSU is dead. I wonder if this unit's form-factor is unique or not. To me it's like a weird mixture of XT and AT — the power switch is located on the PSU itself, but the connector does look like AT.
In the meantime I hooked up a generic AT PSU I had. Works fine, but of course it's like two times smaller than the original PSU and doesn't have a powerswitch built-in.
Next problem — the keyboard. The system gave me several keyboard-related errors at boot, so I tried simply disconnecting the keylock (it had the key inserted and was probably engaged by a previous owner). That didn't help. After some inspection I've noticed that the motherboard battery leaked all over the keyboard port and was probably causing the issues. I've removed the battery and cleaned everything with vinegar. The keyboard works now, and thankfully the machine came with an external battery holder. The keylock, however, still doesn't work, so I'm keeping it disconnected.
I finally got the system to boot:
The system came with MS-DOS 6.22, Norton Commander 5.0 and Dr. Web antivirus with some disk scanning functionality built-in. Looks like the MFM drive doesn't have any bad sectors — very lucky.
Unfortunately, I can't get the 3.5 inches floppy drive to work. I've tried hooking up a different drive that I've used before and tried some disks. The I/O is WD 1003 V-MM2, and any attempt to read a disk results in "General failure reading drive A" error. The drive is configured as 1.44 in BIOS, what else can I try?
