First post, by Gramcon
- Rank
- Newbie
Well, I acquired this awesome DEC 386 in a government auction with a bunch of P4's. Funny that until recently I guess this thing was still in use by the local tax dept. Anyway, I got it home, and it had no hard drive (no surprise) and gave beep errors during POST. I removed and cleaned around the board, reseated the RAM and it started up, no problems except of course that the battery was dead. No big deal, the battery wasn't a nasty barrel kind; it was one that plugged in. I just removed it. Some pics:
I threw a Sound Blaster 16 in for good measure and considered my hard drive options. Since sourcing a working hard drive less than 520mb is very difficult, I've decided to try the compact flash route, but I'm not having much luck. I have tried two different compact flash cards, a Delkin 512mb and a SanDisk 256mb, and two different compact flash controllers. I hit the same wall each time. I can get the BIOS to recognize the drive. I can start from a boot disk and FDISK and format the compact flash and copy files to it all day long. However, whenever I try to execute a program (edit, chkdsk, mem, etc.) from the Compact Flash, it gives an "unable to read" error, abort, retry, fail. Obviously, I cannot boot from it, because it cannot execute command.com.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm new to the CF thing, but I've tried everything I've read about on here, including the clearhdd utility. My only other options are to pay big $$ for a working small IDE drive, go SCSI, or use drive overlay software on a large drive...thanks for any help!