future reference, I personally use a small drill bit in my fingers to drill out the blanked hole on the ps/2.

I did that just this weekend to drill a hole in a modern IDE (80 pin) cable that I was using to troubleshoot some older AT stuff which I didn't feel like mutilating. Works well.

Errius wrote:

Someone mentioned recapping floppy drives. That presumably involves dismantling them, which will knock the heads out of alignment. How you realign the heads?

You don't need to completely disassemble the drive. The caps in question are usually located on the bottom of the drive and require no disassembly. There are better instructions if you google for them.

Thanks for the info guys. Currently waiting on a 2.88 fdd to find out if they are backward compatible or not. New psu arrived today. Still in a holding pattern until I can get a disc to boot. 12887 dallas rtc arrives in a few days, hard to tell if it will actually work.

Thanks again for all the help guys. I got in the 2.88 FDD and 12887 Dallas RTC chip. I am happy to report that yes, the 2.88mb drives do in fact work on PS/2 55SXs, and the RTC works as well. It looks like it's actually a newly manufactured part, which means I should hopefully get many years out of it. Shockingly the ESDI drive works just fine and has a very old DOS-only setup. The oldest files on the drive are 1987 and the newest are 1998. The previous owner was into some sort of politics and there are some amusing (but not salacious) letter drafts on the drive. I went ahead and stuck my ethernet card in and was able to configure it with my reference disk and the disk that came with it. Went ahead and buttoned up the case, aside from sticking a math coprocessor in it, or maybe down the road a graphics/sound/memory expansion, I'm finished. I recently won an auction on ebay for a matching CRT so I'm just left to locate a matching keyboard (not sure I want to splurge on an M) and I'll have a fully functioning, period correct setup. Fun.

On the software side I've figured out how to dd disk images from my Ubuntu laptop and I started installing windows 3.11 for Workgroups last night. My next challenge will be getting networking to work. I've done some preliminary digging and it looks like I'll be able to get windows file sharing to work on my network so I should be able to rapidly abandon having to shuffle floppies around which will be really nice.

cezar wrote:

(not sure I want to splurge on an M)

You do.

Use one once, you never go back. I use one on my daily driver.

Grew up on a M. Honestly they're overrated. Loud and clacky. My modern KB with mx browns is better. I'd buy one, but not for the 150+ they go for. If I could nab one for 30-40 bucks I'd do it.

Ok, new issue. I decided to blow away the dos install on there and do a fresh install. Problem is, it hangs at 'Starting MS-DOS...' now after I finish install. I've tried a few different versions. Thoughts?

Nevermind, got it. Had to delete the partition, re-create, ran sys c: to test, and then reinstalled dos.

Starting to hate floppy drive speeds now. Need to get my network card running.

New problem, after installing windows for workgroups I get this error trying to run 'win':

Either memory is insufficient to run KRNL386.EXE or the value of the Windowmemsize entry in the SYSTEM.INI file is too large. You need to run the Setup program again.

Any ideas? I have 2mb ram I know that's low but there has got to be a way to get windows to run.

So this is kinda odd. I ran the setup on the disk that came with my ethernet card (Etherlink III) and afterward, windows will run... Strange.

It's SUPER slow though, like it takes 5 minutes to open control panel (not exaggerating). Any performance tips?

Past that, does anybody know how I can access shared folders on my network, either within windows or from dos? The NIC appears to be functioning both in dos and windows but I don't know the magic incantations to get it to actually access shared folders on my network. I have both a samba share and a Windows 8.1 box, if that matters.

I'm not sure. It sounds like a driver issue. you might want to go post over on vcfed.org/forums you will get an answer faster there.

I'll do that if I get stuck. Currently reinstalling win3.11wfw and DOS. Had dos and windows going pretty well, but as soon as I installed tcp/ip windows wouldn't load anymore complaining about ram. Too bad I can't image this thing and make snapshots 🤣. I'm probably 8 hours in on trying to get things to play nice.

The obvious thing to do is to upgrade from 2mb to 4mb ram. What sticks do I need and how wide do I need to open my wallet?

Oh, and another thing I noticed, if I ran win /n (no networking), windows ran just fine. So for whatever reason the networking functionality is just sapping the crap out of performance.

Really I could probably do without windows altogether, I just want tcp/ip / SMB file sharing on DOS. Probably going to go that route on this go-around.