Nice, 286 systems are a rare sight here in Sweden these days and the few you see at auction sites sell for crazy money, dumpster prices are the best!

I got my 286 system for a fair price just because it was sold as a broken, unidentified Pentium PC 😀

Well I already have one complete 286 so after I clean this one up and play with it for a while, I'll probably try to sell it. Better to give it a new home than to keep it in storage and never use it.

Added pictures to the first post. Finished washing the bottom part of the case but it needs to dry before I can assemble everything back together.

The processor is an AMD 286-16 which is quite nice I guess.

I will need to replace all the expansion slot covers as the original ones are quite rusty. The same goes for screws and a few other parts of the case and the power supply.

Nice rescue 😀

Teac 5.25" seems to be 1.2MB drive.

nice one!!!!

Really odd and nice rescue with that onboard ide/floppy controller 🤣

kixs wrote:

Nice rescue 😀

Teac 5.25" seems to be 1.2MB drive.

The manual states "double sided 48 tpi" so that's 360 KB.

Integrated MOBOs were the norm for OEMs: even in the late 80. This looks more like a mut.

Nice case, but iam not really fond of that 286 6 isa slot motherboard.

I really hope you can recover it this its best state..

Half-Saint wrote:

kixs wrote:

Nice rescue 😀

Teac 5.25" seems to be 1.2MB drive.

The manual states "double sided 48 tpi" so that's 360 KB.

My mistake 😉

Looks like I was way too optimistic 😀

After cleaning the case and reassembling everything I first found out that the hard drive didn't work so I tried to replace it with a compact flash card. After entering BIOS and setting up the card, the computer froze up before I could save new settings. After a reset it wouldn't POST anymore. No beeps, nothing.

The battery did leak a little bit but I don't think it's anything critical.. or is it? I cleaned up as well as I could. Maybe the thing just wants to go back to the dumpster...

EDIT: I managed to get it to boot from CF by setting the adapter to MASTER however it froze during boot...

EDIT #2: I suspect RAM chips.. will test with known good RAM and see what happens...

EDIT #3: Found jumper settings here: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/U/UN … ml#.Vd3Jtfmqp48

Computer freezes during boot-up even with onboard IDE controller disabled and using a dedicated 16-bit ISA controller..

Rooting for that 286 board here. It is such a nifty-looking compact 286 board. Although it only has 6 ISA slots I kindda like it.

Indeed good work saving any old PC but a 286!
How big is the HDD/CF card? My 486 hangs on 8GB drives even though it detects it fine. Dropping a 6GB HDD or 4GB CF works fine. maybe the controller is just maxed out?
I would try booting from a known working floppy without any hard drive, 1 less thing for POST to worry about.
WORST case, you should be able to sell the case for a bit?

Which stage does it halt at POST ?

- You can try attaching wires to the barrel's legs and hook up a beefier external battery (soldering on the missing pins of the external battery header seems too much trouble for a check)
- some early boards will not boot at ALL if they cannot find a floppy controller, so make sure to have one. I even have a Pentium server board that complains about bad floppy and hdd when the battery runs low!

Compact flash card is 128MB so it should work fine.

The replacement battery is 3.6V 60mAh, the same as originally used.

It freezes randomly while loading stuff listed in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Last time it froze at ECHO OFF 😀

Floppy controller is built-in and enabled. Will try booting off a floppy and report back.

EDIT: tried booting from floppy and failed. Nothing happens after POST, just black screen and blinking cursor in upper left corner.

Can you try increasing wait states for memory?

No, BIOS is very rudimentary. I can only adjust date/time, hard drive settings, floppy settings and that's about it.

My "Mystery Box" 286-16 MHz had similar issues with the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives connected at the same time, I disconnected the 5.25" drive and suddenly everything was fine.

I think the previous ower tried to upgrade my 286 system from 1.2MB + 360KB 5.25" floppy drives to 1.2MB 5.25" + 1.44MB 3.5" and the drives diddnt like each other and thats why he gave up on the box back in 1994 which was the last time any changes were made to the HDD. The FDD + HDD controller card is from 1985 so Im surprised the 1.44MB drive works at all, the system was built 1988 though, or at least the Video-7 VEGA VGA card is from 1988.

Yeah, for testing I removed EVERYTHING except the video card and the CF card to eliminate all possible errors. I tried two different VGA cards.