Just wanted to mention, this "AST Advantage! Plus 486DX2-66" arrived yesterday and sure enough, the CT2760 and WD90C31 match the […]
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Just wanted to mention, this "AST Advantage! Plus 486DX2-66" arrived yesterday and sure enough, the CT2760 and WD90C31 match the ones I found pictures of above exactly. Then... I realized that CD-ROM drive was an original Creative "Sound Blaster" CD-ROM, model CR-563-B 😮!! So... I'm very pleased. Does anyone know if the CT2760 ever came in a CD-ROM combo set? The drive is actually attached to the sound card in this PC, which is something I honestly don't see too often, despite the fact that most cards back then had CD interfaces on them.
On top of that, it looks to have minimal battery damage. I haven't pulled the guts out of it yet for a thorough inspection, but I only see a little bit of white crud on the end of the battery facing the keyboard port. The other side is clean.
This thing is built like a TANK by the way... I've never seen such a premium\expensive feeling PC chassis. The metal is razor sharp, but I'm pretty confident that you could use the frame of this thing as a jack stand. 🤣
As for functionality, I can get it to POST but sadly I cannot seem to get it to boot from the hard drive or from a floppy. Even when I set the hard drive parameters properly it won't boot from that... and none of my boot floppies are recognized as bootable, despite the drive light coming on to check them. Is it possible that it's one of those quirky machines that just cannot function without a CMOS battery? This is, admittedly, the first time I've ever tried diagnosing a 486 system like this. I'm more familiar with older PCs with no BIOS setup, and newer PCs that have a lot more options than this one. I can't even figure out how to boot from the floppy without telling the system there is no hard drive, because it has no boot order selection. There's probably a key to press to make it do that, but I can't seem to find any info about this model online.