Yeah, I have the 486dx-33 working with WinNT351 but it runs slower than I expected. I think I might upgrade the cpu to 55mhz.

You mean 66MHz... see if you can get a 486 DX2 66

Type-O, I mean 486dx-50mhz. 5v.
I also have a 66mhz. But I am going to go with 50mhz.

Thanks all.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Okay, I received the NEW cables today and hooked them up. Now I have a NEW problem. The bios recognizes my Hard-drive just fine. […]
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Okay, I received the NEW cables today and hooked them up.
Now I have a NEW problem.
The bios recognizes my Hard-drive just fine. But when I try to boot from the hard-drive I get an error message
"Hard drive failure, 80 error "
So I can't boot even from a floppy.
I did have to set the jumper on the hard-drive to "Master" other wise I would get a beep error.
Cable select jumper setting does not want to work. ( Error beeps )
floppy appears to be working fine.
Bios can not detect CDROM, So just set to Auto for now.

You may have to go into the bios and configure it to the specifications of your hard drive manually, alot of old drives had the data right on the top label, but you might have to look for a data sheet. You need to enter heads, cylinders, etc. I've never built a 486, but my 386 build and Pentium build both required me to configure the bios to know about my hard drive, auto detecting yielded me similar errors. You should be able to disable the hard drive in bios to force floppy boot to the top of the boot order, no?

Alex

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Okay, I received the NEW cables today and hooked them up. Now I have a NEW problem. The bios recognizes my Hard-drive just fine. […]
Show full quote

Okay, I received the NEW cables today and hooked them up.
Now I have a NEW problem.
The bios recognizes my Hard-drive just fine. But when I try to boot from the hard-drive I get an error message
"Hard drive failure, 80 error "
So I can't boot even from a floppy.
I did have to set the jumper on the hard-drive to "Master" other wise I would get a beep error.
Cable select jumper setting does not want to work. ( Error beeps )
floppy appears to be working fine.
Bios can not detect CDROM, So just set to Auto for now.

how's it going?

I put it off for a while.
I had everything hooked up but I could not get the serial mouse to work.
Shows up okay in device manager. Serial ports show as working okay.
But the mouse would not work.
I tried different serial cables and different serial mouse and even a Serial/PS2 adapter with PS2 mouse.
I could NOT get it to work.

Any Ideas ?

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I tried different serial cables and different serial mouse and even a Serial/PS2 adapter with PS2 mouse.
I could NOT get it to work.

Any Ideas ?

Um, it may sound stupid but have you tried different serial back plates? I've run into this problem with ISA I/O cards and AT motherboards may have the same issue - there were 2 variants of the card/connector pin-outs. Who knows...?

Yeah, I will have to order some different ones and try again.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Yeah, I will have to order some different ones and try again.

I can make a couple of suggestions because I've gone through similar struggles recently.

1) Don't assume that a PS/2 mouse will work on a 9-pin serial port via a PS/2 --> Serial adapter -- those little adapters are ubiquitous and cheap, but they are *passive* adapters. The on-the-wire protocols for PS/2 mice and serial mice are incompatible, and a PS/2 mouse has to support both protocols internally for a passive adapter like that to work. The only *active* PS/2 -> serial adapter I've been able to get my hands on is incorporated into a Belkin KVM switch, and it works brilliantly. It was a lucky find to say the least, because now I am able to use an optical PS/2 mouse on any of my 4 vintage DOS machines, regardless of which interface they have available for the mouse. The name/model # is: Belkin Omni View SE 4-Port F1D104. It has a funky 1.5U rack mounting option, but can also be used as a desktop item.

2) There are two different standards for 9-pin serial pinouts: DTK/Intel, and AT/Everex. One is staggered and one is straight-through, basically. The solution for me was to whip out my soldering iron and a desktop electronics clamp, and re-solder the damn connections one at a time according to spec. If you order a 10-pin header --> 9-pin dsub ribbon cable adapter from Amazon or eBay, you're rolling the dice on which of these two standards you're going to get. I got unlucky and brute forced it to make it work. (And it does work now, beautifully.) Another thing I should mention is that when the pin-out is "wrong"(in the sense that your I/O card header adheres to one spec and the ribbon cable adapter adheres to the other one), the behavior can be deceptive, and frustratingly so. The device plugged in to it can receive power and appear to be functioning to the OS or to a program, but incorrectly. So it could be in your case that it shows up in Device Manager because Microsoft didn't do a thorough job of detecting the hardware properly, and there's enough connectivity occurring to fool it. I've seen this kind of thing happen with an external modem, and I've also seen it happen with a mouse.

Half the reason that I'm replying to you is so that you know what's going on in case it still doesn't work after trying different ribbon cable adapters. You might get unlucky and order several different ones from different sellers only to find out that none of them work with your setup because they're all adhering to the "wrong" standard. Sellers never seem to post which standard they adhere to -- probably because this is pretty obscure stuff, even by retro/vintage standards. It doesn't help that labeling on electronics is rarely what it should be. 😉

I Have ordered some new serial cables. I use to be able to go to a local electronics store to purchase them but they dont sell old components Anymore, So I have to buy from china.
I am also going to try some ps/2 connection cables.

Putting build on hold until I recieve new parts.