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NCR 3300 Model 5100 486 BIOS Update/Manual?

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First post, by legodude

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Hi All,
I accidentally ended up with a NCR 486 recently, and I can't find anything about it with my googling. This looks like a very primitive system to me. It is a 486DX 50mhz with 8mb ram. There are four 16bit ISA slots on a riser. The badging is NCR 3300 Model 5100. There is one for sale on Ebay right now:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/196011692915

I lifted their motherboard photo:

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Here are photos of my system:

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Can anyone provide further information about this system or possibly a bios update? I can't find it on the The Retro Web - there are similar-ish systems, but no perfect match. I can't seem to put in custom hard drive geometry, it seems to ask for a "USERHDD" utility, which I also cannot find. There are a few references to userhdd.exe on a German forum from 10-20yrs ago, but that's it

thanks
mike

Reply 1 of 7, by Horun

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Found it in the NCR archives. The original name was 3330UHDD.EXE, a self extracting file with userhdd.exe and .txt inside.
Attached as a zip. Here is the source: https://web.archive.org/web/20001212095600/ht … rary/3330.shtml
I suggest you grab all the other files too...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 7, by Horun

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Great ! Did find some notes about an addendum to manual but no manual....

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 7, by legodude

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Thanks so much. I'm embarrassed that I did not even think to check archive.org. My bios is E.5, which looks to be the second newest version - judging by the date strings in the bin file, E.5 is a few months older than E.6. The note that "The 3330 does not support flashable BIOS upgrades so you will need access to an EPROM burner"is a bit of a buzzkill. I'm happy to buy an EEPROM burner if needed, but I'm not sure this NCR is going to be enough of a reason.

The "service diag disk" is shockingly useless. Other than finding that I have 1mb of video ram, I didn't find anything of value.

USERHDD did not work on my first pass through, but I'll fight with it some more before giving up. This whole system is giving me "proprietary in a bad way" vibes.

mike

Reply 5 of 7, by Horun

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Yeah being 1993 bios without Large or LBA modes it will have a 504/528Mb size limit of 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors . So if you want to use a 1GB HD then Ez-Drive/Drive Pro/etc would be your easiest way...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 6 of 7, by legodude

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Just to follow up on this... the USERHDD program is odd:

-Enter drive geometry into USERHDD and save, reboot
-Enter setup, change drive type to 1, save, reboot
-Enter setup. Only after two reboots will drive geometry show up in the bios.

I have not tested extensively, but I believe the 1024/16/63 limit is accurate. USERHDD explicitly lists the cylinder limit, but not heads or sectors.

mike

Reply 7 of 7, by legodude

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I ended up making bad decisions and purchasing an EEPROM programmer. I updated the BIOS to E.6, but did not notice any improvements. I also got a NE2000 for use with XTIDE and can now boot from SD cards. Oh, and a PicoGUS 2.0. I've played a few games and have been mostly successful - some Keen games have graphic corruption.

mike

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