to switch which floppy to boot from, swap the ribbon cable connectors, the connector after the cable twist is the drive A: one.
You can also do it by swapping the a:/b: jumpers on the drives themselves but swapping the connectors is easiest usually.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on top of MS-DOS 6.22 is your best bet for that thing.

also
good luck replacing that battery

retrofool wrote:

to switch which floppy to boot from, swap the ribbon cable connectors, the connector after the cable twist is the drive A: one.
You can also do it by swapping the a:/b: jumpers on the drives themselves but swapping the connectors is easiest usually.

Some BIOS have a setting for swapping A and B drives without the need for exchanging the connectors. You could look for something like "Disk Drive Swap" in BIOS setup.

386DX40 with cache and 387 - performance could be around 486DX20/25 level.

NB. 386 support was pulled from Linux some way back, So any attempt to use Linux would need one predating the 3.8 kernel.

Ideal for DOS/Win3.x - Windows 95 CAN be run on a 386, and will install, but unless the RAM is 8MB or better, will be spluttering along on swapfile.

CD-ROM - of course, off an IDE adapter or a soundcard with CD support.

Was that all that was in the case? - there are no onboard features, so it needs an IDE controller (or multi-IO) and a graphics card.

WOW nice find! That is a really cool looking computer not to mention the 5.25" floppy diskette drive looks really cool with that lip around the slot. That's a lucky find! Where did you get it?

I got from a friend at work,he said it was used every now and then TO THIS DAY ,that's why the battery still hasn't leaked I guess and is in such nice original condition,also It has a hard and 3 cards(a graphic,parallel and scsi controller)I probably put some better cards in it,as for the motherboard,it is already good enough !

What a great find!
I really like the mobo, replace the battery and the whole system is a keeper!

Non-yellowed case and floppy drives (Ye-data 1.2MB 5.25" especially) are looking cool.

What you have is:

- A nice 386 mobo with an AMD 386DX-33 CPU (strange, since their -40 processors are much more widespread), a matching IIT mathco, some amount of cache, and a non-leaking battery. You don't need to replace the battery, but you can just remove it. The 4-pin connector (with a missing pin) besides the power connector is an external battery box connector. You can find a 4xAA battery box just for this purpose.

- Trident 9000 VGA board with 512KB memory. Drivers for this (windows 3.1/3.11) is available in Vogons Library. You might want to find a better card though, at least with a 1MB memory (1024x768 in 256 colors needs that much at least)

- A floppy/HDD controller card and a multi I/O card. I don't know if you have the serial port bracket on the case, but in any case, the two headers on the top back corner of the I/O card are for serial ports (named as ASYN1 and 2)

- You can add a CD-ROM drive of course. Your exisiting controller has only for 2 IDE devices, so you can add a CD-ROM if you only have a single HDD. Be carefull about slave/master jumpers, since those old HDD drives has sometimes not only slave/master settings but a third option which is "master with a slave drive". You can also add a sound card with IDE header as a second option for CD-ROM drive.

- I don't know how much RAM do you have on that board but you can easily have 64MB since OWC still has 16MB 30pin SIMMs. You need to populate 4 banks, since the board will require you to do so (16 x 4 = 64)

- Your best bet will be MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.1. You can even find a ISA Ethernet card and prefer WfW 3.11 for network capability. It's fun to connect to the internet and browsing the net with IE5.5 or Netscape 4.x..😀

An absolutely great find. Please don't hesitate to ask away anything, I love those 386 machines and I recently completed two builds already, so I have some fresh information on how to deal with most of the things...😀

Yep, I slipped up, saw AMD 386 and assumed 40.

If you can find a card that does ALL the IO (IDE, floppy, serial & parallel) then it would be one less card.

From what I managed to look up on the winbond chips, it looks like the serial is single character buffered, ok for lower speed - maybe up to 19.2k, but for faster serial speeds the Windows 3.x update for the 16C550 came into its own - serial chipsets in that style had a 16 character buffer with a settable interrupt point - and could hold up at 112k/230k speeds for using serial data transfer cables.

With Ethernet, serial speed probably wont be an issue. Place I was at, 3COM Etherlink III's were the standard card.

PS. If you go WIndows for Workgroups 3.11, hopefully the Microsoft TCP/IP support can still be found. Wow still on MS FTP... ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/TCP32B.EXE

That is a VERY nice case - I like those old cases with the rocker switches.
Where has this thing been the last 15 years bit ti be yellowed? 😀

That is a VERY nice case - I like those old cases with the rocker switches.
Where has this thing been the last 15 years bit ti be yellowed? 😀

Well it was sitting in a small room with no windows,hiding under the desk,it was mainly used every now and then for some calculating by some architects,it has 4 sticks of memory ...

How can I make a boot-able diskette for MS DOS or Windows 3.1 ?

ncmark wrote:

Damn that computer is cool inside and out.

You can get disc images from bootdisc.com

At some point you need MS-DOS and Windows installation discs. You can get them second hand or "download" them.

Once you have the MS-DOS discs you could follow my tutorials: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-tutorials.html

It has start-up files ready to download which should make it easy. If you are stuck let us know.

If you want I have all the original diskettes for windows 3.1. I could upload copies of them for you.

So I finally found a good enough monitor for it,a 14 CTX monitor works pretty good

I'm having quite some trouble finding a working pc with a floppy drive where i can write the diskettes,all of my spare floppy drives have sat for quite some time ...

You can buy a cheap USB floppy. It works well enough for that purpose
on almost any newer computer

Did you try cleaning the drives out? Blowing all the dust out of the internals with an air compressor and cleaning the read and write heads with alcohol? I've revived drives I had assumed dead by doing this. Btw nice choice of monitor, I have a flat screen CTX monitor that I use with my Packard Bell. Very snazzy.

Wow, not only it hasn't yellowed at all, even the original key is still there. Very nice! 😀

somedude192 wrote:

Well it was sitting in a small room with no windows,hiding under the desk,it was mainly used every now and then for some calcula […]
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That is a VERY nice case - I like those old cases with the rocker switches.
Where has this thing been the last 15 years bit ti be yellowed? 😀

Well it was sitting in a small room with no windows,hiding under the desk,it was mainly used every now and then for some calculating by some architects,it has 4 sticks of memory ...

How can I make a boot-able diskette for MS DOS or Windows 3.1 ?

1407754072015.jpg

ncmark wrote:

Can you tell how much RAM do you have by looking at the boot-up screen or BIOS? These looks like 256KB or 1MB sticks to me, which will make only 1 MB or 4MB rescpetively. If it is 1MB, it is not acceptable even for a 386/Windows 3.1 machine. If it is 4 MB, maybe ok for its time, but barely. I suggest you to go look at this one:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World% … uting/30PS16MB/

4 of them (a 386DX always need groups of four sticks = 32bit) will make a whopping 64MB, which will be "Ultra Mega Ultimately Ultimate" mem capacity for 386...😀

You can find bootable floppy images all around, even MS-DOS and Windows floppy images in many abandoneware sites. And as someone suggest, putting your hands on a USB floppy drive will help.

Just one thing I need to ask. You said the computer was in use till recently. Doesn't it have a harddisk? Why can't you boot from it?

Another option for you to prepare a bootable CF card and connect it to its IDE controller by using one of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Compact-Flash-CF-to-3 … =item5d427ad390

IF you can boot the machine with a CF card, you will solve also all your data transfer problems as well. Just don't forget to find a CF card with 512MB capacity max. 386 era BIOSes have problems with harddisks bigger than 512 MB (there are of course solutions to that, too).