So, hopefully this is the last issue im gonna have with this machine, have installed the dos driver's to it but dos keep's getting back with 'drive not ready' error, even on a regular game disc, i did have the drive apart to check for dust on the lens but it seemed fine, gave it some light cleaning, but didnt seem to work, is it something due to dos?

Hi NIC-93, got your PM thanks! Well, there are many things why a CD drive won't work, including it just being bad unfortunately....😮) Here are a few ideas:

- Do you hear the CD-ROM spin up at all? Put a disc in and reboot - it should spin-up when the NCR drivers load.
- What kind of HDD do you have, IDE or SCSI?
- A photo of the innards would be real nice, if not just for my curiosity...😮)
- When the NCR SCSI drivers load, do you see the CD-ROM drive and HDD listed with unique SCSI IDs?
- Could you send me your autoexec.bat and config.sys files, post them here or via PM?
- Final possibility is the drive is bad - no way to test that without another SCSI CD-ROM - rare as all get out noawdays...😮)

This might be helpful for info and drivers on the CD-ROM:
https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Compu … Drives/DR-U124X

Hope this helps Nic, cheers! Bellarmine

Its a weird mix of on board scsi and ide, hard drive sit's on the ide and cd rom alone on scsi, i used a program named prosci to install the driver, it does a run scan on start, setting the drive id
had a peek inside the drive and unfortanly a gear was shot, but i know somebody who's gonna give me a replacement drive! one they know work, another fellow local collector.

How to test Base 512k Address Lines

These machines aren't worth the trouble IMO. Too finicky and nobody here will (or is able to, IDK I didn't get much help with my XL590's base 512K error) help you with more than basic problems with these. I ended up having to scrap mine. Damn shame. The XL590 is a sister unit. Same dual socket 5 pentiums on a daugher board.

All it took to kill it was it being moved very gently from one side of the room to the other.

That flaming shitpile of a computer was only useful in that it was what brought me to VOGONs originally and it functioned long enough before dieing to show me how much more enjoyable DOS games are on their native hardware. Argueably that may have been worth the $10 I paid for it

Ah, so the CD drive was bad - too bad....😮) Happy you're getting another, those SCSI cd-roms are very rare now. I have 3 from my Dad's DEC systems, but only 1 works 🤣 - those Toshiba drives DEC used aren't very reliable.

- You can also use any standard IDE CD-ROM and put it in as a slave to the HDD.
- A 153MB HDD is pretty small for a Pentium! Ask if your friend has any bigger SCSI HDDs. We had a Seagate 1GB SCSI Hawk drive preloaded with WfW 3.11, up to 2.1GB should work no problem.
- Or, you can also use any bigger IDE drive up to 2GB, or a much bigger one if you load some overlay BIOS software, such as Seagate or MaxBlast EZ-BIOS. I've used it works pretty well for older machines. I actually have a Promise EIDEMAX ISA card that gives it an 8.4GB Hardware BIOS and a secondary IDE Channel, pretty handy.
- You can also use PATA HDDs up to 127GB if you drop in a Promise ULTRA66 card! Not sure if an ULTRA100 card might work too.
- If you have another 100MHZ Pentium CPU, you can drop it in for dual processing in Win NT 4 or WIn2000! Kingston TurboChip 233MMX chips work great.
- Finally, we loved to max out our machines - you can stick up to 512MB of RAM into these using 128MB 72-pin SIMMs - how about that!

What BIOS version version are you using? I checked my files and I have Version 2.04 Nov 30-1995 - let me know if you need it.

Hope that bit of triva was interesting NIC - Cheers!~ Bellarmine

Hi NIC,

Ok, here's BIOS version 2.04 for the Celebris XL 5100, along with a few other goodies, and the System Maintenance Manual.

There's also more in my driver collection mentioned below, you might want to check it out when I upload it. How's it going with the Celebris NIC, you get it running with the CD-ROM, bigger HDD, any questions? Let me know, love talking about this vintage stuff...😮)

I've RAR'ed up my DEC driver collection, with a README history - comes in at 278MB, not complete by any means but a nice collection for the various machines that I hope will be helpful. How can I upload it?

Hope this helps someone, cheers NIC!~

Bellarmine