First post, by GooseNipples
Good morning,
Here is what I have:
I/O Card:
Jumpers (I left them set to how they were when it showed up in the mail. I have no idea what to set them to)
IDE Pin 1 location
FDD Pin 1 location
IDE Cable best-guess orientation (Pink strip is pin 1 right?)
FDD cable best-guess orientation (pink strip is pin 1 right?)
386 info
Model: ISA-386U3
So my last job was for one of the major power plant maintenance companies, and one of the greybeards there took a shine to me (I'm IT) and I had long admired this crusty 386 board that had been used in some old power plant control system that he had sitting on one of his office shelves. Sadly the barrel battery had exploded and leaked all over the traces and ISA slots. When he retired, I found it sitting on my desk. I took it home and removed the exploded battery, and then cleaned up as much of the blue-ed copper as I could with alcohol and a toothbrush. One of the ISA slots is still pretty blue. I blew out or scrubbed everything I could reach, but I did not have high hopes for it. To my surprise, it fired right up. I hooked up a Trident TVGA 8900D and confirmed it had video out. I maxed out the memory and added a math coprocessor because reasons. It recognized the RAM. I haven't gotten as far as checking whether or not the coprocessor works yet. I had an I/O card laying around (which is now in my 486, working well with an IDE to CF in a PCI slot) which I was not able to make work with this machine - I tried all sorts of different adapters, etc, to no avail. I'm sure the jumpers were wrong or something, or i could be something else. I let the machine sit for.....probably close to a year now and noted that I/O controllers are starting to get rarer and pricier out in ebayland, so I bought another one to try to make work with this machine. I played with it with all my different IDE to whatever adapters and such last night for a little while and was not able to make it work. I resigned myself to taking lots of pictures and try to be as detailed as I can here on Vogons in the hopes that you kind folks would be able to help me make this thing work. I have another 386 board, but it's only a 386 20MHz, and the chip is soldered onto the board. I really really want to play OG Wing Commander 1 on this machine, plus whatever else I can scrounge up. I am also pretty sure that any of the changes that I make in the BIOS aren't being saved because there is no battery. So presumably I need to hook up a battery to it before I can do anything?
Board:
Battery area:
Damaged ISA slot (Still works though)
External Battery that I need to figure out how to hook up:
(I also have a handful of those little 3xAAA battery holders somewhere that I couldn't find to take a picture of)
Various storage media options:
I would prefer to use either the IDE to CF or the disk on modules, though I'm not sure my kludged together daisychain of adapters is going to work for those
IDE to CF
IDE to CF jumpers area
Other options
The IDE to SATA would be probably my last choice
DoM kludge
laptop IDE male to male adapter (IDE Cable -> Full size IDE to laptop IDE adapter -> male to male laptop IDE -> DoM. Would this even work?)
DoM pinout
BIOS:
Type all this in on (almost every) boot
Save to CMOS and Exit = Y
SOMEHOW this past boot when I went down to take pictures of the BIOS screens just now.....it detected the floppy drive and MS-DOS diskette inside.....
Did not boot successfully to it though
After a reboot
What is my order of operations here?
Battery first?
Do I need to change any jumpers on the mainboard to boot from the I/O card?
Do I need to change jumpers on the I/O card?
Do I have the cables on the I/O card in the correct orientation?
Do I use option 32 for hard drive settings in the BIOS (128MB) for my CF card?
Is this all rather pointless because the board is damaged?
