Looks to me like what you get sometimes if you use low concentration Isopropyl, dunno if it's a denaturant or they just diluted it with local water supply which had minerals in it.

might be mineral water additives, wash with some detergent and a toothbrush.

Thanks all, I’ll give that a try to get the junk off.

As for the floppy drive the motherboard can see it but when I try to access it in dos I immediately get “Data error reading drive A”. Ive tried 3 drives and 4 cables at this point. I’m guessing something on the motherboard has started to fail. Before I track down a isa floppy controller card is there anything else I should be checking?

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:26:

Thanks all, I’ll give that a try to get the junk off.

As for the floppy drive the motherboard can see it but when I try to access it in dos I immediately get “Data error reading drive A”. Ive tried 3 drives and 4 cables at this point. I’m guessing something on the motherboard has started to fail. Before I track down a isa floppy controller card is there anything else I should be checking?

If you have tried multiple drives and cables then its very likely the controller on the motherboard has issues, possibly a cap has died or the control IC has internal issues.

Its not uncommon for IO stuff to fail on old hardware, usually its the IDE controller that fails first.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:56:

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:26:

Thanks all, I’ll give that a try to get the junk off.

As for the floppy drive the motherboard can see it but when I try to access it in dos I immediately get “Data error reading drive A”. Ive tried 3 drives and 4 cables at this point. I’m guessing something on the motherboard has started to fail. Before I track down a isa floppy controller card is there anything else I should be checking?

If you have tried multiple drives and cables then its very likely the controller on the motherboard has issues, possibly a cap has died or the control IC has internal issues.

Its not uncommon for IO stuff to fail on old hardware, usually its the IDE controller that fails first.

That's what I was afraid of but not surprising, off to ebay to find a controller card.

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:20:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:56:

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:26:

Thanks all, I’ll give that a try to get the junk off.

As for the floppy drive the motherboard can see it but when I try to access it in dos I immediately get “Data error reading drive A”. Ive tried 3 drives and 4 cables at this point. I’m guessing something on the motherboard has started to fail. Before I track down a isa floppy controller card is there anything else I should be checking?

If you have tried multiple drives and cables then its very likely the controller on the motherboard has issues, possibly a cap has died or the control IC has internal issues.

Its not uncommon for IO stuff to fail on old hardware, usually its the IDE controller that fails first.

That's what I was afraid of but not surprising, off to ebay to find a controller card.

A suggestion would be to get an IO card that does everything, since if the Floppy controller is dying then its likely the IDE controller will soon follow it, so grab a all in one IO card and move everything to that to preserve what functions the motherboard still has working.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:23:

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:20:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:56:

If you have tried multiple drives and cables then its very likely the controller on the motherboard has issues, possibly a cap has died or the control IC has internal issues.

Its not uncommon for IO stuff to fail on old hardware, usually its the IDE controller that fails first.

That's what I was afraid of but not surprising, off to ebay to find a controller card.

A suggestion would be to get an IO card that does everything, since if the Floppy controller is dying then its likely the IDE controller will soon follow it, so grab a all in one IO card and move everything to that to preserve what functions the motherboard still has working.

Seems reasonable to me.
Do you have any preference when it comes to controllers?

Any ISA one that has the features your board comes with would work well enough, two IDE channels, Floppy and com ports if you match it as well as you can to what your motherboard has it'll be easier when moving stuff over as you will know you have enough on the IO card.

as for models .. god its been years since I have had to resort to one but Im 100% sure that the XT,286/386/486 aficionados here at Vogons can point out good models but I suspect they too will simply suggest that what ever you can find at a reasonable price with the features you want will work as well as any other. (I would suggest a nice 16 bit ISA model unless your riser support VLB then you could grab a VLB IO card)

So good news, bad news.

I got my hands on a DTC - Data Technology - 2280-E controller card off ebay. However, I can't for the life of me get the card to work and I suspect it may be because of the motherboard's bios. I can disable the secondary hard drive entry and both floppy drive entries in the bios but I appear to have no control over the primary hard drive entry. So with nothing connected to the ide interface on the motherboard, the bios reports no hard drive detected. Then it dumps to the insert floppy disk screen. That said I still tried to get the card working with all jumpers on the card in the factory position and the cf card plugged in at the end of the ribbon cable but no luck.

Over the weekend I was able to start using the floppy drive again so I was able to install windows 95. I managed to track down the controller card's drivers and install them. However, no matter what IRQ settings I use on the board and in windows, windows can't see the card. So this leads me to two possibilities, the bios is flat out preventing me from using the card or the card itself is bad and I'll need to get something else.

The second bit of news is I managed to get a Kingston 5x86 @133mhz and it works, hurray. But the fan sounds like it's on its last leg so now I'll be looking into how to remove the fan so I can thermal epoxy a heatsink/fan onto it.

not quite the same board, but it never is:
IBM PS/1 2155-593 Restoration

Intel486dx33 also posted a link there, 3rd post, that look like quite the resource, including that pdf manual.

1.) IBM may be notorious for going their own ways but they're not Apple. So chances are many measures and standards are still the AT
2.) see 1, LPX is the key, but the riser slot may correspond with AT or ISA slot 7 (from the bottom in a tower config), putting it about 125 mm from the boards edge. If so, it should work with any desktop case that used to have the riser their, if those do exist. Only pizzabox I have uses slot 6. With anything but the original case, expect to need a dremel at some point.
3.) definitely FPM. I had FPM in my 1997 P1, was still cheaper then
4.) I agree that 16 should be plenty, but trying out couldn't hurt?
6.) I'd assume you'd have to get one of those adapter sockets for any CPU with 3.x volts? Otherwise stuck at dx2-80?
7.) https://octopart.com/hm514260aj-8-hitachi-2257174
Those two beetles left of the cirrus chip are 256k x 16 bits, so 512 kB each.
Video RAM requirements are really straightforward, iirc: Warcraft 2 would have 640 x 480 pixels at 256 colors, that being 2^8, you'd need 8 bit, or one byte, times the pixels, makes 307.200 byte or 300 kByte - so 1 MB should be plenty for DOS gaming and somewhat sufficient for shitty CRT-era Windows.

Have fun!

So after much stressing I managed to remove the fan from my Am5x86 using a chisel blade on an x-acto knife. After carefully working the blade under the fan the majority of it broke free. Unfortunately a portion remained stuck to the cpu. I spent about an hour painstakingly scraping the plastic off but I removed enough that I should be able to glue on a new heatsink with thermal paste in the center. Thankfully after all that I was able to power up the system, boot into windows 95 and play SimCity 2000 for about 10 minutes. The cpu never went above 101f with a fan blowing on it, so I'm reasonably confident the heatsink fan combo I have coming in will be more than enough to keep it cool.

Fan removed

Failing fan

Most of the plastic scraped off

Most the old glue cleaned off

Testing that the cpu still works

Ah, so you do have a dx4-133 already. Didn't catch that before. Bit of an overkill for the system per se, but if it's there?

For sure, that looks like shit.
I had some glue residues on a dx2-66 that slowly yielded to an prolonged acetone treatment, but that was CPGA, with you plastic chip, you'd have the make sure the chip itself won't dissolve.
If optics don't matter, mechanical force might suffice. Sand paper. Or an angle grinder. 😜

9731 on the chip means that it was manufactured in the 31st week of 1997, I think. Rather late 486.
In a somewhat ventilated case, it will probably be fine with a modern passive heatsink. Maybe one meant for a modern motherboard northbridge - plenty of those to chose from.
Consider, theses things were sold with an active one so they won't cause an RMA case in the most sealed off, 286-era death trap.

That makes sense and I didn't even think about using a northbridge heatsink. That said though I went ahead and ordered a set along with some fans.

I got a heat sink attached and so far so good. Even without a fan the cpu sits at 121f. Sim city 2000 proved to be pretty good keeping the cpu at 100%. I plan to attach a cpu fan later tonight to see what kind of temperature I get.

Fan installed

failuresuccess wrote on 2022-03-05, 19:52:

Even without a fan the cpu sits at 121f.

You are aware that you're using freedom units?

Cute cat! 😀

Evening all,

So my PS/1 finally stopped booting all together, it never seems to get to a point to where it can post. I removed all the expansion cards, the hard drive, and floppy. I've also tried booting with the integrated cpu, two different amd 5x86 cpus, and different sticks of ram. No post beeps or anything like that either. The psu checks out, I don't see any cracked traces and no magic smoke was released. At this point I'm guessing the 30 year old electrolytic capacitors have given up the ghost.

Has anyone ever recapped their IBM before and had any success? I believe there are 3 different electrolytic capacitor types on the motherboard.
68uf 16v - 13 Count
22uf 50v - 9 Count
2.2uf 50v - 2 Count

I'm willing to give it a try if I'm not barking up the wrong tree. I'm ok at soldering and it looks like the capacitors can be had relatively cheaply on mouser for about $16.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!