the bios preset is "1.44M 3½-inch"
The sucky thing here is that the battery is on the very bottom of the system, point welded to a connector so I'll have to remove the whole thing and solder in a new battery connector.
Good and bad news!
1: The HDD is fine and actually works again. (I took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it.)
2: the floppy drive behaves normally but doesn't open any programs on boot. (Might be because the cd drive still doesn't work. it won't even open the tray. I dunno if it would be a good idea to try it in the mitsumi slot, it has the same amount of pins but I don't want to fry this thing)
(I haven't swapped the battery yet. seems like a pretty hard thing to do with this model)
I'd try temporarily leaving the CD drive disconnected and if there is an option for the CD drive in the BIOS, set it to none, so at least you could try booting from a boot disk.
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]
wrote:I'd try temporarily leaving the CD drive disconnected and if there is an option for the CD drive in the BIOS, set it to none, so at least you could try booting from a boot disk.
The motherboard is too old to have an option for a CD drive. the funny thing is that it allows me to use a boot disk if I plug the cd drive into an IDE slot but not if I have it in the soundcard
That's really odd, OEM machines of this era were most of the time quirky, if it doesn't detect the CD drive (just leave it disconnected) it may have a chance of trying to boot from the floppy drive.
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]
Lovely vintage PB! Do you still have it?
