She's not tall so much as wide.

gdjacobs wrote:

She's not tall so much as wide.

I think it's quite tall. At 49 cm it's 1,5 cm taller than my Fractal Design Arc Midi case...and heavy! Bloody thing must weigh some 15 kilos.

4x 5.25 bays could be fun to fill up 😀
Show us the inside please?

Was just about to make a few quick snapshots when my camera battery died 😜

Anyway, I want to replace the leaking battery before I take pictures. Wanted to install a VLB graphics card tonight only to find out that the ISA part of the card isn't making a connection with the ISA slot. So I had to disassemble everything and correctly align the back part of the case which holds the cards in place. Now I can install VLB cards fine 😀

I'll make some pictures tomorrow after I'm done replacing the battery.

Cheers!

Funny, if you look at the photo the right way, the big one looks normal sized while the little one looks like it was shot by Duke Nukem's shrink ray.

UPDATE [PHOTOS ADDED]:
I removed the motherboard again and cleaned all the battery leakage with vinegar and isopropyl alcohol. Luckily, nothing seems to be damaged.

Now you can see the system as it was when I got it. All the expansion cards, floppy drives and the PSU have that orange/red label with '91 in the date. The motherboard hasn't got a sticker and the BIOS chip is dated 1993 so my guess is that it was a later upgrade of the original configuration and bought elsewhere.

The hard drives are Quantum ProDrive ELS 170AT and a Seagate ST351A/X. I suspect the Seagate is dead, not sure about the Quantum. You can hear the motor running but when I took out the drive, I noticed a huge burn mark on the side of the PCB. The guy who mounted the drive used a screw that was way too long and basically crushed the part of the PCB where the screw went in.

Planned upgrades are VLB video card, VLB disk controller and a sound card, possibly Sound Blaster 16. I'll also be replacing the hard drives because they are way too loud for comfort. I'll either be keeping this PC or selling it locally because it's way too heavy to be shipped.

Keep your eyes open for an S3 VLB card and an IO/IDE controller (with 16550A uarts and EPP) for even more awesome!

Weird thing is none of the floppy drives will read disks. All I'm getting is "General failure reading drive A:". I now only have 5.25" connected and configured in BIOS as A: 1.2MB and it still won't work. The LED lights up and you can hear it's turning but the error keeps popping up.

Half-Saint wrote:

Weird thing is none of the floppy drives will read disks. All I'm getting is "General failure reading drive A:". I now only have 5.25" connected and configured in BIOS as A: 1.2MB and it still won't work. The LED lights up and you can hear it's turning but the error keeps popping up.

Lovely! My Compaq Deskpro EX i440BX boards will only work with some floppy drives drives and some cables and only with the drive conneced as B: drive but working as A: drive. Using the A: drive connector only works if there is also a floppy drive connected as B:(=A:) drive and there is no way to reverse floppy drives.

Guess if this was hard figure out when I mostly use floppy cables with a single A: drive connector. Floppy drive controller failed! No floppy drive found! Or at best a floppy drive found and showing signs of life but not reading floppies. I finally figured out that i needed to use the B: connector and that only some drives actully would read floppies correctly with the Deskpros floppy controller.

Ah, thanks for the info! I reconnected 5.25" as B: and 3.5" as A: but still no joy. Cleaning the heads of 5.25" drive didn't help and 3.5" drive is returning "Data error reading drive A:".

Anything else I can try?

Half-Saint wrote:

Ah, thanks for the info! I reconnected 5.25" as B: and 3.5" as A: but still no joy. Cleaning the heads of 5.25" drive didn't help and 3.5" drive is returning "Data error reading drive A:".

Anything else I can try?

I would test a few other floppy drives and cables. Testing another I/O card is also worth a shot as is changing resources on the card you use now.

Sometimes I dont even know what fixed issues like this eventhough Im pretty structured in my trouble shooting, non working floppy drives almost always seem to be fixable though. I think I only have experienced a broken floppy controller once during 25 years of computer tinkering.

I installed a different controller and now at least floppy A: works. Floppy B: correctly reports "Not ready reading drive B:" when there's no disk in drive B:, yet still reports "General failure reading drive B:" with about a dozen of my disks! Just tried another cable and same thing happens.

EDIT:
I'll try another 5.25" tomorrow (same model) and see what happens. Just too tired to do any more tinkering right now 😀

UPDATE:
Just installed the floppy in a 386 that has the exact same model floppy drive installed and it doesn't work either. However, at least here I can switch to A: and only after typing 'dir' does it report "Not ready reading drive A:". Maybe I should start a separate topic about this 😀

Success! After cleaning the motor shaft as well as the head rail and lubricating both with dry lube for bicycle chains, it now works like new!

I installed that VLB card and video output on an LCD monitor is excellent. Next is the sound card. Should I go for SB16 or AWE32?

Half-Saint wrote:

UPDATE [PHOTOS ADDED]: I removed the motherboard again and cleaned all the battery leakage with vinegar and isopropyl alcohol. L […]
Show full quote

UPDATE [PHOTOS ADDED]:
I removed the motherboard again and cleaned all the battery leakage with vinegar and isopropyl alcohol. Luckily, nothing seems to be damaged.

Now you can see the system as it was when I got it. All the expansion cards, floppy drives and the PSU have that orange/red label with '91 in the date. The motherboard hasn't got a sticker and the BIOS chip is dated 1993 so my guess is that it was a later upgrade of the original configuration and bought elsewhere.

The hard drives are Quantum ProDrive ELS 170AT and a Seagate ST351A/X. I suspect the Seagate is dead, not sure about the Quantum. You can hear the motor running but when I took out the drive, I noticed a huge burn mark on the side of the PCB. The guy who mounted the drive used a screw that was way too long and basically crushed the part of the PCB where the screw went in.

Planned upgrades are VLB video card, VLB disk controller and a sound card, possibly Sound Blaster 16. I'll also be replacing the hard drives because they are way too loud for comfort. I'll either be keeping this PC or selling it locally because it's way too heavy to be shipped.

Dont throw this away: ST351A/X Its an Seagate IDE AT / XT harddisk.. A special harddisk that can work in AT IDE mode and the old style XT IDE.. Guess that drive is 40MB.. I suspect the Seagate is dead Would suspect that, maybe it isnt jumperd right..

Maybe its now in XT IDE mode.. So the drive wont work in this state on an IDE AT cable. @ AT IDE mode.
These drives are really nice to install them in an XT system..

Robin4 wrote:

Dont throw this away: ST351A/X Its an Seagate IDE AT / XT harddisk.. A special harddisk that can work in AT IDE mode and the old style XT IDE.. Guess that drive is 40MB.. I suspect the Seagate is dead Would suspect that, maybe it isnt jumperd right..

Maybe its now in XT IDE mode.. So the drive wont work in this state on an IDE AT cable. @ AT IDE mode.
These drives are really nice to install them in an XT system..

After reading this, I decided to give the drive another test run. The IDE connector pins were crooked so I had to fix that first. Next, I jumpered it as Master and connected everything. BIOS detected the hard drive right away and the computer booted into DOS 6.20 without a problem 😀

I checked the drive with SCANDISK and it appears to be healthy with no bad sectors.

There is another problem which occasionally shows up. Video sometimes becomes garbled, for example, when I was running SCANDISK for the first time, the screen became full of colorful ASCII characters after a while. As soon as I exited to DOS, display went back to normal. Also, sometimes during bootup, the same thing happens but goes away when the POST screen disappears. Any ideas? Could it be bad video memory? I'd hate having to hunt for a new card but I can temporarily switch to an ISA ET4000, if need be.

Just gave this 486 a deserved upgrade in the form of a 3com Etherlink III card 😀 Good thing I didn't throw away the disks all those years ago. I installed Netware drivers, Clarkson packet driver and mTCP on top of that. DHCP worked out of the box and the machine is now connected to the Internet.

The problem now is that my main rig is on one subnet (192.168.1.100) and the 486 is on another (192.168.2.185) so they don't see each other. Is there a way around this?

Any particular reason why your house has multiple subnets?

If there are multiple routers involved there are some solutions. One is to add a route that will let one subnet send packets to the other subnet. (By default 192.168.x.x addresses are private and non-routable.) The other is to get the routers to work together so that one subnet is used.

The only reason is that I never thought of doing it any other way. The 2nd router is connected to the main one via WAN port so it has to be on a different subnet. I found a simple tutorial on connecting the routers via LAN ports and disabling DHCP. Let's hope this works.

EDIT: I just figured out why I had things setup the way they were. The 2nd router was in reality connected directly to one of LAN ports on the ADSL modem and not the 1st router. When I connected both routers via LAN ports, things started to work as intended and I don't need to have a different subnet any longer. Linksys is in the ground floor and SMC is in my office in the 1st floor along with my main desktop PC and the printer.

Here's how it used to be: