First post, by Justin1091
Hey guys,
For a few years this old 286 pc was collecting dust in my room because the clock capacitor had leaked onto the motherboard and destroyed the keyboard traces.
This month I decided to read about soldering and I succeeded in repairing my old Xbox which had the same leaking capacitor issue.
I thought to try repairing the 286 pc, carefully removing the DIN keyboard connector and inspecting the traces. I put some tin on a broken trace and installed a new DIN connector. I then installed the ISA videocard to test it. It worked! I was excited to see the pc responded to the keyboard.
Next was installing the floppy, ide, serial, parallel expansion card. A few years ago it worked but now I heard a slight hiss when powering the PC on with this card installed. I tried different slots until a capacitor exploded on this card. There is stuff written on the capacitor:
A- 10u 25
My question is: do you guys think the expansion card can be repaired by replacing this capacitor? Or is it more likely that someting else on the card is faulty and it'll just explode again? I also need some help understanding these things. The A I don't understand, 10u is resistance and 25 is voltage? It's a ceramic capacitor I think.
Second question: the PC's BIOS asks me to input Cylinder Head Sector for the drive and I think I can find that online, but it also asks for WPcom and LZone. Does anyone know anything about those two things? EDIT: it's a Kyocera 41 megabyte hard drive.
It'd be cool to have this thing up and running again, check to see what's on the hdd and maybe play some games!
The pc is an Octek FOX II 286.
I've asked the same question here https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … ith_old_286_pc/
Many thanks in advance!