I am also interested in knowing

I think I have seen special setup floppy disks so you need to boot from those to change the settings. I'm not sure if the PCS 386 series already has an integrated setup in the bios. I'll see what I can find.

I had Olivetti 386SX back then, it had a special Disk for BIOS.

Try
Shift/Ctrl/Alt + NumPad Del

matze79 wrote on 2020-06-11, 09:00:

I had Olivetti 386SX back then, it had a special Disk for BIOS.

Try
Shift/Ctrl/Alt + NumPad Del

I just recently got an Olivetti PCS 33 (386 SX/25) and I'm struggling with same problem. Yes, that key combination works for "Extended Setup" which lets you modify the very basic BIOS parameters like time/date, language and video. Everything else seems to require a BIOS boot disk of sorts. Where, oh where to get one nowadays... Google didn't help much. I found one for PCS 46/C but it's much newer (486 DX/50) so we'll see if it works at all.

edit: There might be a chance if you use Generic Setup 3.1 that was designed to be jack-of-all-trades BIOS boot program for several AT machines:
https://www.uselesssoftware.com/download/gsetup-zip

I'll have to try out that one, too.

Well, I finally got to tinker with my PCS33 and tried that PCS46 user disk image... It was to no surprise a dead end. GSETUP.exe I also mentioned did work, but I could only choose from few very small preset HDDs ranging from 40Mb to 120Mb. Must be computer BIOS related somehow because some have reported even 20 or more preset choices with various PC models.

I really wanted to use bigger storage than 120Mb with my PCS33 so I circled around the problem by using SD to IDE adapter, 2Gb SD card and installing the EZ-Drive software with floppy drive. EZ-Drive bypasses the HDD restrictions in PCS33's BIOS and replaces it with it's own software configuration. Now my only problem is that during the boot I get "Disk 2 not recognized, Press F1 to continue" every time. SD card is recognized by EZ-Drive as Disk 1 and the PCS33 IDE cable has only a single connector for one IDE device so I'm not sure if the culprit for the error message is the SD adapter (which doesn't have jumpers to set it Master or Single) or some EZ-Drive configuration that I have missed. Or perhaps I could disable that second HDD check from PCS33 BIOS with the User Disk (that I don't have)? I can't know since I can't find the damn disk anywhere, image or physical.

I guess it's not a huge problem since right now all I have to do is press F1 every time I boot the machine to continue but nevertheless it's slightly irritating because that error interrupts the boot sequence in the middle. I guess I'll try next either real physical HDD or maybe I'll switch the SD to CompactFlash. At least my CF adapters have Master/Slave jumper.

Ahhhh... Olivetti PCS33. If you didn't happen to be my first personal childhood experience with PC computers I'd ditch you for someone else in a blink. Now nostalgia's got the better of me and I'm bent on trying to make our relationship work.

Quick update. I tried different CF adapters and a Fujitsu 1Gb HDD. Compact Flash cards did not work: EZ drive software recognized and was able to format them but PCS 33 refused to boot from any of the CF cards. I've tested them on other systems so those CF cards definitely are bootable. Fujitsu HDD probably would have worked right away but I noticed that just after installing EZ from a floppy and booting to finalize the setup before installing actual OS my PCS 33 lost the configuration info that HDD was enabled. I had to quickly press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Del during boot to gain access to the bare-stripped BIOS setup which allowed me only to change the language of BIOS or enable/disable the HDD. Apparently EZ installer had somehow ticked HDD status to OFF for some reason. I enabled it again and voila! HDD was recognized. However same "Disk 2 not recognized" returned so it seems not to be fault of hardware or it's Master/Slave. It all boils down to that damned Olivetti BIOS software... I can't disable Disk 2 check on boot sequence without it. I just have to live with it. Oh well, at least the system works!

TL;DR: I tried both CF (didn't work here) and HDD (worked in the end) but I chose to go back to the SD card. Mainly for ease of file transfer and silent action. Softwares like EZ Drive seem to be the only viable way to circumvent the lack of BIOS configuration and rather poor choices for different HDD sizes in an old PC like Olivetti PCS 33 if you are missing the original utility software required. Luckily I don't need to change any other settings in this.