Personally, I would not bother with this card if I had another one. No documentation and already damaged... others in the same boat were asking for a manual about similar cards...no luck.

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?531 … an-anyone-ID-it

You can still try though

https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/z/cunid_1.htm

Deksor wrote:

Well this was the battery ^^
And the huge missing trace is the ground, and I checked with my multimeter, it's not disconnected

That round circle, whas this the place where a 10uF cap was ?
Just asking, because that's a spot where sound cards often have that cap.

Jolaes76 wrote:

Personally, I would not bother with this card if I had another one.

Do you know where to get such a card with RTC ? I'm looking for one, too.
Haven't seen them on Ebay for years.

Jolaes76 wrote:

Personally, I would not bother with this card if I had another one. No documentation and already damaged... others in the same b […]
Show full quote

Personally, I would not bother with this card if I had another one. No documentation and already damaged... others in the same boat were asking for a manual about similar cards...no luck.

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?531 … an-anyone-ID-it

You can still try though

https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/z/cunid_1.htm

Well I don't like to destroy hardware when it's close to beeing functionnal (at least I hope ...). And if I want to buy it, I don't think that this would be as cheap as the computer was (counting the rest, the computer costed me less than 10€, maybe even less than 5)

Jo22 wrote:

Deksor wrote:

Well this was the battery ^^
And the huge missing trace is the ground, and I checked with my multimeter, it's not disconnected

That round circle, whas this the place where a 10uF cap was ?
Just asking, because that's a spot where sound cards often have that cap.

Well there was no component at all there. Just the battery. There is a spot for a capacitor actually, but it wasn't populated (and there are no remains of any component there)

here is what I had with that 8088 Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today ^^

Do you know where to get such a card with RTC ? I'm looking for one, too.
Haven't seen them on Ebay for years.

Not on ebay, no. Better luck locally on flea markets, or facebook retro groups, other members at amibay or vcfed selling items etc.
The pricing varies greatly though so I perfectly understand if one will not throw out defective parts while there is storage room. I also keep some (like a defective but rare 286 EMS board).

If RTC is not a requirement then there are some 8/16 bit controllers, some of them can configure the XT IDE port to H320-H323 or H324-H327 for really old pre-AT hard drives.
You have better chances finding these IF you know what to look for...

Ok, so for the controller ... it's just me being dumb 🤣

I've pluged the cable backward.
However I'm having trouble to have it back working (I had to clean it because it was very dirty and it made a circular mark on one of my floppy). Now it's nice and clean, but it doesn't work (I did'nt touch the head alignment captor. However I moved the other captor and it seems that the drive doesn't like that 😒

Anyways, I can just use a regular 3.5" floppy drive for now I guess

Yes... A regular 720k drive 😀

Another new : I've checked the tantalum capacitors of the HDD and two of them had a resistance of 0 ohm. I disconnected them from the circuit and the disk started to spin ! (well after the explosion of a third one 🤣). But the disk stops after a while ... Probably because there are at least 3 capacitors missing 🤣 (maybe even more because many of them including the one that exploded had an infinite resistance)

I also checked the PSU voltages, but they seemed okay. I don't know what's wrong here (I will have to replace every single capacitor here too)

I'm glad you found the culprit(s). The shutdown of the disk could be caused by an automated mechanism.
This usually happens if no signal from the controller card is received.

Well this card is detected by the computer too. But it's higly probable that the capacitors are making the circuitry unable to see that it's connected to a controller. The only thing left I can do for now is trying to make an AT to XT adapter. I'll try that. However for the rest I'll have to wait

Here is a better view of the inside of the computer :

A lot of standard AT keyboard have a PC/AT or XT/AT switch on the underside. At least a lot of the ones that I own which are mostly Cherry G80-1000 and G80-3000. They started omitting the switch in later years.

Sadly I don't think I've got one 😒
I haven't checked all of them but I think that I would have seen that. I'll check them later but yeah I don't think I've got one

Here are some news !
I received fresh capacitors for the HDD and japanese caps for the PSU. I said that the computer crashed randomly, well now it doesn't do it anymore. It's funny to see that 2016 rubycon capacitors are actually 2 times smaller than 28 years old teapo capacitors. However the functionning of the hdd is ... random ... most of the times it seeks and stop. But sometimes it manages to not stop and then it lets the computer boot on it and the computer then displays a lovely
C:\
>

(which I can't use since I don't have any compatible keyboard. I tried the arduino converter, but I had no luck with that thing ...)

Oh and also when I said that this PC was in an AT form factor, well I was wrong. I just didn't knew how XT looked like and since it looks a lot like AT I thought that it was AT.

I'm leaving the computer turned on doing nothing because I think that it may help the hdd to work a little better

Edit : I left it for approximatively 4-5hours almost countinuously. After one hour, it still did the same thing. After two hours, still the same thing. I was a bit sad about that thinking that it would stay like that ... But I kept it running during the evening and when I came back and rebooted it once again, it worked on the first try ! Second try : still working ! After a 15 and a 30min break, still working. I'll see tomorrow if it really repaired itself or not

Edit 2 : Okay so it was still working this morning. At some point it started to do the same problem, but after running it for half an hour it came back to life again. I tried to boot from a floppy disk in order to control the computer via hyper terminal as someone advised me, but it doesn't want to for some reasons ... maybe because this controller is also the RTC card and so it was in a bad shape after the leaking of the awful varta battery. I didn't notice last time that the jumper box of that card has some switches that move just like there was nothing behind it and some other doesn't want to move at all so I think that this jumper box is completely destroyed in the inside. I will replace that. I'm also going to replace some of the chips on it because some of them has remaining corrosion that may (or will) cause issues too

So the RTC/io board isn't healthy. I took another io board (16 bit ISA this time, so munch newer) and it booted. But I didn't manage to have ctty working ...

It displayed correctly in hyperterminal, but when I typed stuff, it didn't do anything at all

Hmm.. Perhaps the settings aren't compatible.
Try to set hyperterminal to, say, 2400baud / 8 data bit / 1 stop bit / no parity / hand shake xon/xoff or none.
Also make sure you have the terminal emulation set to TTY or VT52 / VT100 and enable "local echo" (so you can see what you are typing).
Please tell, if this works. Btw, are you using an USB-Serial cable ?

I set 2400baud,8 data bit, 1 stop bit no parity, xon/xoff and terminal emulation to TTY and VT52. The only thing I didn't try was VT100 and local echo, but even typing "dir" doesn't do anything

And no, I'm not using an usb serial cable. I'm using a good old pentium 2 and it's serial port and I'm hooking up both computers between each other with a nullmodem cable

Uhm, okay. I have no idea what causes the issue at the moment.
Maybe try checking the cable, there's a nice thread about null-modems (warning, shameless self advertising ahead! 😉 )
A Null-Modem is a Null Modem, right?

And for a quick test of your 8088 machine you can also run MSD in auto mode.
The command is MSD /P msd_diag.txt (see screenshot).