First post, by keenmaster486
- Rank
- l33t
I finally have succumbed to my more basic instincts and acquired a 286 machine.
Here is a glamor shot of it just for kicks. I will post more detailed pictures later.
EDIT: Some more pics:
I found the unit on eBay for a reasonable price; it was listed as for parts due to not having a video card. One Oak 16-bit ISA VGA card later, and I was in business.
It will boot from a floppy disk. But the 43 MB RLL drive is giving me fits. The controller is a Seagate ST-21/22. What is strange about it is that the drive will spin up and make a lot of noise if you connect only the power without the data cables. But as soon as you hook up the wider data cable (not the narrower one), it will not spin up when you power on the machine. As I mentioned, this does not occur if you only hook up the narrow cable. With both cables connected the controller detects the drive (claiming it is an RLL drive) and wants to perform a low level format on it, but of course it cannot due to the drive not having spun up. I wonder what is causing this. I have very little experience with MFM/RLL drives so I really don't know what I'm doing here. Some quick searches don't turn up much on how to connect these things. Do I need to set something in the BIOS? The CMOS has Drive C: as "Not Installed". I tried setting it to Type 14 (43 MB) and it said "Drive C: Error" when booting. There's nothing on the drive that indicates what the geometry is, so I have no reference point as to which type I should set. I do notice that there are several that give a capacity of 43 MB. Maybe I should just try all of them until something works.
Anyway, this will be a lot of fun to play around with. Stay tuned to find out in what gruesome way I take my revenge on this hard drive when it begins to slowly eat away at my soul.
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.