The card we were all tryuing to figure out tunrned out to be domething the previous owner tried to put together on his own. He actuallu did a pretty decent job of it too. I called him to ask about this card and what he told me made me laugh so hard I almost fell out of my power chair. The card started out as a standard IDE add-on card with IDE and Floppy drive pin-outs. The card was then cut into two pieces where he removed the floppy drive controller bank and installed another IDE connector to use as what he claims as :the first raid contoller". When he got the two cards merged, he then installed into his XT computer in an attempt to conreoll 4 hard drives installed inside. The card works for the connector nearest the expansion bay cover, but won'k work at all for the secondary set of IDE connections. That's why nobody here knew what the bloody thing was. Once I got my composure back, I asked him why he wanted to connect 4 internal drives in his XT. He told me that he wanted two drives running on RAID 0, and the rother pair would run RAID 1. Needless to say, it didn't work the way he expected. He's pretty intelligent, but also not too smart, if you know what I mean.
OK, that's out of the way. Let's try to get back on topic. I have some questions about the original post. Can U use any of these cards with mt 5150? More impotantly, can I juwst swap out my known working parallel port and install the 486s Parallel/Serial card and have it work? Since this is a swappout, will I need to reset the DIP switches in order for the "new" card to function properly?
Also, I have been searching for the drivers for the 3COM Ethernet adapter (listed below) to no avail. All of the sites I was able to find want to install some version of software driver Master, Driver Genius, Driver This, or driver that, to scan the system for outdated drivers, when all I need is the actual DOS driver.
Let's try this again, shall we? Here are the two expansion cards I want to use in my 5150.
Serial/Parallel card - Part No. 4990/2593 PCA-1-0
3Com Etherlink lll 1995 3C5098-C ASSY 03-0021-02 Rev A
What out of these cards can I absolutely use in my 5150? And, can someone point me to the 3Com driver? I jave been looking for several days and cannot find one. 3Com themselves support doesn't go back that far either. Any pointers?
I promise, once these two particular issues have been resolved, I won't be nearly as much of a pain in the ass as I have been ove the last two months. Hopefully, when Hargle gets the new revision of his XTIDE is released. That will complete the main system unit much, much more capable.
Once again, my machine is happy, my wife is happy, and most of all, I am very happy with the computer I got. . Thanks again for all of your help.
