I have been mostly pulling my hair out today as I continue to try getting a floppy drive to work in my old Packard Bell PB440. After disassembling it almost entirely and reassembling it, I'm still at square one. This particular PC might be a lost cause as nothing seems to get the built-in FDC or an ISA FDC to work. It's as if there is simply something BIOS-level or something (I have no idea at this point) that is preventing any sort of FDD to work in this system.

I decided to move on to a PC Chips M919 v3.2-based build with a 486/66. The system generally runs well and I am running MS-DOS 7.10 so that I can access the full 6.2 GB of the HDD installed. I ordered a SATA-to-IDE adaptor that arrived today, but I'm striking out completely today. The smallest SATA drive I have, for testing, is 500 GB. I didn't expect to be able to use all of that, even with a drive overlay, but I cannot even get the system to boot at this stage, with it hanging after detecting the boot hard drive and then I suspect attempting to access the SATA drive through the adaptor. I've tried master/slave, running each on their own (primary and secondary) and all sorts of combinations. Nothing seems to work. If I select None, the Ontrack Disk Manager will boot from floppy, but then just hang on loading, with the 3.5" disk just spinning forever. Worse yet, in anticipation of it working, I ordered a 64 GB SSD from Amazon, and at this point, I'm suspecting that it is just a waste. At least it was only $25, but still.

A pretty disheartening day, all said. A lot of time spent working on this and while it was fun at first, the more I could see it simply wasn't coming together, the more and more depressing it got. This is about it for the hardware I have, and so I don't really have other motherboards, etc. that I can experiment with other combinations and I just cannot really afford to purchase more. I've been going in over my head the past few weeks and think I just need to clean up and pack up a lot of this and take a break.

Could your PB be using a proprietary Floppy drive or cable? Many OEMs use these.. You could try another ISA IDE/Floppy controller to it to resolve the issue maybe, in case the one you tried is also faulty?

Finally finished my K6 build:

Motherboard: MS-5169. I was lucky to find a backplate that almost had the same layout on ebay for 5€
CPU: K6-3 450
RAM: 655MB
GPU: Matrox Millenium G200 (might add 8MB SGRAM later on) + 2x Voodoo2 CT6670
Soundcard: Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI
HD: CF 8GB as a main HD + Quantum Fireball CR 13GB
Drives: Gotek floppy and 16x or 32x CD-ROM
OS: Win ME. System restore is disabled. Unofficial SP not installed (yet)

Tested Thief 1 Gold on it. Had to try it......Aaaaaah memories!!!
I had problems with Fastvoodoo drivers so I installed the 'latest' Creative ones. Works like a charm now.
The only thing missing is a casebadge but I ordered a 3dfx one :p

Nice machine.. I'm also looking for a similar old ATX backplate myself, for my K6 PC.

appiah4 wrote:

Could your PB be using a proprietary Floppy drive or cable? Many OEMs use these.. You could try another ISA IDE/Floppy controller to it to resolve the issue maybe, in case the one you tried is also faulty?

I've gone nuts with it. Installed an ISA FDC and tried various combinations of FDDs, cables, disks, combinations of BIOS settings, you name it. It's the most bizarre thing I've seen with this computer. I'm going to be SOL if the HDD fails, shy of first setting the HDD on another PC before transplanting. Doable, I suppose, but a PITA.

Oh well! I'll figure something out. 😀

appiah4 wrote:

Nice machine.. I'm also looking for a similar old ATX backplate myself, for my K6 PC.

Thanks! I had to search a bit but found it on ebay.

Huh.

8 bit ISA, 68k CPU, 16MHz clock crystal, TI memory controller, NEC and Motorola DSPs, two bios chips labeled 11001 PC17

Labeled (K) VOX 33101001 R2, A 851 0160/00 R1A A41, SA 201/PC R2A 8502, and Löpnummer 100061

One of the traces from the pins looks deliberately cut and there's a "blue" wire on the other side of the board. It could also be accidental damage, the card was found in a pile of leaves, pine needles, spiders, and dirt, and I have no history on it at all. Surprisingly almost completely free of corrosion.

The bracket has two unlabeled 1/8" sockets and an unlabeled rotary rheostat.

I won't say *no* idea what it is, but not much of one.

The "vox" bit combined with the 3.5mm (?) jacks and rheostat sounds like it was some kind of voice/audio system, but that hardware... this is almost a whole Mac / Atari ST on an ISA card - computationally more powerful than the XT-class machine it would have been inserted into. As intrigued as you are.

Merovign wrote:

...the card was found in a pile of leaves, pine needles, spiders, and dirt, and I have no history on it at all. Surprisingly almost completely free of corrosion.

When you find something like this in a pile of leaves, nine times out of ten it opens a dimensional portal.

liqmat wrote:

Merovign wrote:

...the card was found in a pile of leaves, pine needles, spiders, and dirt, and I have no history on it at all. Surprisingly almost completely free of corrosion.

When you find something like this in a pile of leaves, nine times out of ten it opens a dimensional portal.

Or it came through dimensional portal and is probably a galactic scale apocalyptic weapon. Expect inter-dimensional forces to invade your home in search for it pretty soon.

liqmat wrote:

Merovign wrote:

...the card was found in a pile of leaves, pine needles, spiders, and dirt, and I have no history on it at all. Surprisingly almost completely free of corrosion.

When you find something like this in a pile of leaves, nine times out of ten it opens a dimensional portal.

(looks around)

Leave it to me to be the one out of ten.

Hmph.

dionb wrote:

The "vox" bit combined with the 3.5mm (?) jacks and rheostat sounds like it was some kind of voice/audio system, but that hardware... this is almost a whole Mac / Atari ST on an ISA card - computationally more powerful than the XT-class machine it would have been inserted into. As intrigued as you are.

None of the labels led me anywhere on Gurgle.

Given the low serial number (almost certainly #61) and the edit wires, I'd say it's a low-production piece of gear, maybe something academic or for sound studios in the mid-to-late 80s.

It may mean something that the sound (?) jacks are 1/8" instead of 1/4" or RCA, given the estimated vintage.

I'm not sure what it means that almost everything is in English but the label for the serial number is in German.

Maybe I will try to figure out which is input and output (if that's even relevant). I wonder if it requires -5V?

If I find anything I'll open a thread in the main hardware area just for kicks. Who doesn't like a little mystery?

appiah4 wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Merovign wrote:

...the card was found in a pile of leaves, pine needles, spiders, and dirt, and I have no history on it at all. Surprisingly almost completely free of corrosion.

When you find something like this in a pile of leaves, nine times out of ten it opens a dimensional portal.

Or it came through dimensional portal and is probably a galactic scale apocalyptic weapon. Expect inter-dimensional forces to invade your home in search for it pretty soon.

Frankly a cash offer would be easier for all parties.

Merovign wrote:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

None of the labels led me anywhere on Gurgle.

[...]

I'm not sure what it means that almost everything is in English but the label for the serial number is in German.

One tip: "löpnummer" isn't German (that would be Laufnummer) but Swedish. That possibly narrows things down.

Also one thing to keep in mind is, even if the connector looks like 8-bit ISA doesn't mean it's actually ISA. That type of connector were used in all kinds of machines, not only in PCs.

Interesting card. I would read the two ROMs and See what is inside...

dionb wrote:

Merovign wrote:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

None of the labels led me anywhere on Gurgle.

[...]

I'm not sure what it means that almost everything is in English but the label for the serial number is in German.

One tip: "löpnummer" isn't German (that would be Laufnummer) but Swedish. That possibly narrows things down.

Yup, my Deutsche is apparently a lot rustier than this card. Narrows it down considerably.

Must be from Ikea then. Sorry,couldn't resist it 😀

Murugan wrote:

Must be from Ikea then. Sorry,couldn't resist it 😀

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