Set starting adress of the expansion board to 8000 (to avoid detection by BIOS and subsequent crash) and try testx.exe linked here 😉

ISA XMS/EMS Memory Extension / Expansion cards: Now Running without Driver / Documentation :-)

It will give you an overview about amount and status of RAM on your different boards. Dont load any device drivers.

You dont have any documentation for the DIP settings?

Thanks! That program is really handy, however in may case, as my computer is really old, it doesn't quite work as intended.

The test program (in my case at least) detects the RAM setting that is determined through the Config / Bios / Cmos config utility on the Compaq Portable 386 and not what is actually physically installed. For example, my machine had 4mb ram that is factory installed, but can be removed to 1 MB. I removed 2mb (so 2mb remaining) and it still tried to scan for 3 mb extended memory (of which it showed 2 as "fail" as they were not there, and 1 as pass, because I had not updated the compaq's CMOS / BIOS through a configuration utility.

So in my case with the Kingston ATaboard, it's going through POST with an amount of RAM slightly higher than it is set for, but in dos this memory cannot be seen, and / or the computer doesn't ask me to update the memory configuration via the compaq utilities disk. Typically when memory is added or removed the computer will boot and ask me to insert the configuration diskette to reconfigure the RAM settings.

I actually have a few ISA ram boards, one of which is an older AST Advantage! with it's piggyback expansion. This board is populated with individual chips and requires no configuration software - it's starting address and memory size is configured through DIP switches - this board works flawlessly with the Compaq Portable 386, though is limited to 3.5 MB and is really really heavy (I think it weighs about 1/2 pound!) - not ideal for my portable.

To make things even more interesting, I also have a AST six pak 286 - this one does not show up in POST or via the test program at all. In fact, when I run the installation / utility program to install and configure the six pak 286, the computer crashes with a series of beeps and jumbled lines and characters on the screen. 😕

Speaking of beeps - another strange thing with the kingston ATaboard was that over hours of trying different settings and rebooting the computer, the PC speaker began to generate off tone beeps, and then stopped working altogether - only after removing the CMOS battery from the board was I able to revive it. 😕 😕

This is all the testing I've done so far, but I think I might have a culprit - in order to speed up the computer I was using a TI 486 SXL - 40 which was already giving me graphics issues when using my ISA VGA graphics card (the factory drivers stopped working, but the default VGA drivers for WfW 3.11 still work), and I suspect it either might have damaged something on the board or caused memory address / ISA bus issues.

Tonight I will run further tests - I have a backup stock portable 386 and I'll try a clean dos install with just the ATaboard expansion and see how that computer reacts - if it works on the stock model then I guess there might be something damaged on the board I was using.

Any other pointers would be much appreciated!! 😀

=Update=

So, I've managed to get my AST SixPak 286 working (turns out I had not configured it properly using smart6.com - and nothing to do with my motherboard or upgraded CPU) and now my Compaq Portable 386 has a comfortable 8mb of RAM. Though, I was hoping for some improvement in overall performance - there wasn't much - I'm guessing the bottleneck lies in the limited speed of the 16-bit ISA. Even when the computer goes through POST you can see when it starts to check the RAM on the ISA card it checks it much more slowly.

I'm guessing there is something wrong with my Kingston Ataboard ISA card - or maybe the starting address needs to be played with, as on the SixPak 286, when I specified the starting address to be 4096KB (4MB) it would't work, so I ended up specifying the starting address to something less than 4096 (don't remember the exact KB amount) and I got the machine to see all 8 MB successfully.

Hopefully this post helps someone trying to upgrade the ram on a Compaq Portable 386. 😀