Rummaging through my stack of old mobos I came across a 286 mobo from days gone by. Not sure why it was there as I've tossed out a lot of stuff like this over the years. The barrel cmoss battery had been removed. It has 1mb in dimms on the mobo. Put an isa video card in it , hooked up an AT psu using a hdd to provide some sort of load. Well bugger me it fired up with the usual cmos errors you'd expect.
I've soldered a coin cell battery holder and inserted a new battery. Fitted isa card with fdd and ide hdd headers. Did a bit more testing. Looking good. Fitted an 8-bit IDE controller, then an EIDE Promise card. Yip the 286 mobo seems to be doing exactly what it should.
I scrounged around a bit more and found an Adaptic scsi controller card with fdd support , cable and a scsi hdd.Booted into a IBM PC Dos 6.3 installation boot disk, removed a partitions on the hdd. Created one active primary partition and saved the settings. Next rebooted back in to PC Dos, then formatted and installed PC Dos on to the hdd and rebooted. Up came the Dos prompt-happy me.
Did some more scrounging amongst my parts and pulled out the isa ram expansion card it kept off a system I wrecked years ago. Turned off the psu to the mobo, fitted the isa ram expansion card and then fire the system up again. All two megs of ram on the expansion card was counted along with the available conventional memory. Tho bios complained about the added memory, which was good and expected. I was presented with a text prompt saying press F1 or CTL-ALT-ESC to enter the bios. I pressed F1 and the system presented the C:>. Type mem then pressed enter and all the memory on the system was displayed.
Now I put this mobo in storage because I'd had a problem with it that I can't recall at present so more testing required.
So far I'm very please with the out come. 😀 I'll post a separate thread in due course.