Remember this stuff?

[Bozo]

I have a computer on my bench for repairs today that is bringing back some old memories. It is a plain beige box like a million others.
When I took a closer look at the front of it, I noticed it has a 5.25" floppy drive installed along with a conventional 3.5" floppy. No CD or DVD.
The rear of the computer has one connector on the motherboard. It is for a serial keyboard. No mouse port. I removed the cover (top and both sides are one piece) and found a motherboard with 6 ISA slots. No ports for a hard drive or floppy drives. These ports , along with the printer port, a serial port, and a game port are handled by an add-in card. The video is on an ISA board. And to top everything off, a 210 MEG Conner hard drive.
I'm supposed to get this thing running again. Righhhttt... :-o

 

[timwhit]

What could possibly be on there that would make sense to pay you to get it working again?

Around 1999 or 2000 I was working at a computer repair store and someone brought in something like this: http://oldcomputers.net/compaqii.html They wanted some financial records that were on it. It was a royal pain to get the hard disk out of it. I believe it was all torx screws.

 

[P5-133XL]

Do you even know what is wrong? Working parts may be a bear to find.

 

[CougTek]

You could tell them that you're not even sure you had turned fourty back when that machine got sold (I'm sure they can tell your fourties were a while ago... ). You simply no longer have parts to repair that thing. Maybe you can retrieve the informations on the hard drive, but that's it. Computers are meant to run for five years, not 20 to 25.

 

[jtr1962]

What parts aren't working? I still have a bunch of stuff (some found, some bought on eBay) for older machines (i.e. 386/486 vintage). I might be able to help. I definitely have ISA hard drive cards if that's all you need.

 

[P5-133XL]

Unfortunately, time is not your friend when dealing with very old electronics...

 

[Bozo]

Actually I'm at work and this a work computer. It contains some propriety software that runs on DOS 6.??.
It even has a proprietary board it that connects to a small lab furnace.
I put the hard drive in a 1998 vintage Gateway and it booted up. I'll see if I can get the floppy drives working next.

I don't throw anything out until the boss has a hissy fit. The Gateway was stashed under my desk for just such occasions.

 

[mubs]

Of course I remember this stuff. I even remember IBM PCs with full height 10 MB hard drives (yes, that's a whole 10 MB). I remember ST-506 interfaces that were a pain. I have some expensive Adobe software (PS typefaces I think) that came on 5.25" floppies. The Compaq's with the 8086 processor were preferred by the finance types for use with Lotus 1-2-3 because it was faster and supported more RAM. There were incompatibilities, though. And this stuff was slower than dried molasses.

Then there were the Compaq "portables" with the miniscule screens. We rightly called them luggables, not portables.

Dos should work on a newer machine. Something I did a few years ago was buy a YE-Data USB external floppy drive as insurance for weirdo situations. Have needed it a couple of times, but otherwise it's in storage. It's about 3x as fast as the in-built drives. My latest build (Dec 2012) doesn't have a floppy drive; I finally screwed up the courage to dispense with it. The MB not having a floppy controller helped

 

[Chewy509]

Oh, the memories - even remember having to try and source HDDs that had particular "Type" information that matched what the BIOS had (since the BIOS didn't have autodetection, nor CHS overrides, nor CHS user defined aka Type 47). eg http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hdtypes/hdtypes-3.html

The days when 256KB was extreme for a VGA controller! (and you could get 640x400 x 256 colours resolution)! sniff... (Back when tech's had to know what the IRQs and IO Ports were, SIMMs were the new thing as opposed to inserting chips directly on the mainboard, Adlib was king, and we took pride in being able to service a machine without slicing one's wrists on the sharp edges of the case)!

I haven't had a floppy drive in my main desktop since '04? which came a PITA when I needed to do a BIOS upgrade on that motherboard, since it only worked via floppy!

 

[jtr1962]

My latest build (Dec 2012) doesn't have a floppy drive; I finally screwed up the courage to dispense with it. The MB not having a floppy controller helped

Same here on both counts. So far I haven't needed it. I think it's safe to say the floppy really is dead at this point. Now what the do with all those disks I picked up for nearly free when Staples and CompUSA used to have their specials?

 

[Bozo]

After getting the system running I started playing with the DOS menu that comes up after boot. Surprise! Windows 3.11 is installed too.

 

[Mercutio]

Same here on both counts. So far I haven't needed it. I think it's safe to say the floppy really is dead at this point. Now what the do with all those disks I picked up for nearly free when Staples and CompUSA used to have their specials?

Floppy drives will need to exist at least until Windows XP and Server 2003 are retired, particularly since part of the PITA of getting it working on newer hardware is dealing with the joys of storage controllers for which those OSes do not have drivers. I keep a USB floppy drive in my car and need to use it two or three times a year.

 

[mubs]

What is weird is that XP SP3 does not natively support SATA controllers. I find that incomprehensible.

Because of this, I had one hell of a problem in December last year trying to convert my old XP install (in the PC that died) into a VM, and a week ago, of trying to clone a PATA XP install to a SATA disk.

 

[Bozo]

What is weird is that XP SP3 does not natively support SATA controllers. I find that incomprehensible.

Because of this, I had one hell of a problem in December last year trying to convert my old XP install (in the PC that died) into a VM, and a week ago, of trying to clone a PATA XP install to a SATA disk.

I have not had any problem installing XP on SATA. I just make sure that AHCI is not selected in BIOS.

 

[Mercutio]

You can't always turn it off.

 

[Bozo]

Oh. I'm only familiar with Intel motherboards.

 

[Mercutio]

Be glad you've never dealt with the horrors of a Acer BIOS.