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Another recycle-center rescue...

Excellent work :)

A few months back I bought a dead 386 - turned out to be a cheap'n nasty serial port card someone had thrown in - one of it's caps was shorting. Whip out the card and viola!
Pretty cool you have something more interesting than DOS preloaded.
 
commodorejohn said:
Success! The problem child was the multi-I/O card; I replaced that with a spare and it's now booting. It's a XENIX System V setup (good Lord, there was a time when you could run Unices in 1.6MB of RAM? Though I've dropped in some extra.) Bitches at me about the missing mega-serial card, even! Of course, now there's the problem of my not having the password, so I'll probably have to image it anyway, but it's still pretty neat to have this thing booting :)

(Now what I'd really like to know is how come it reports 7MB XMS + 640KB when according to the manual it only supports 256KB, 1MB, and 4MB SIMMs, and it passes the full memory tests so it's not a malfunction? Unless the 640KB isn't actually onboard and it's stealing 1MB out of 8MB for conventional memory...)
Click to expand...

I was wondering about that myself, with 8 sticks of ram, like in your picture I would have thought it had 2, 8, or 32mb. If you use a diagnostic tool, does it report the correct amount of ram? I've used a copy of memtest86 for such things. Maybe it is reporting less ram because you have the bios/v-bios shadowed?
 
The manual isn't really enlightening on that topic, but it's certainly a possibility - it is set to shadow the BIOS and video BIOS. I doubt that accounts for the missing 384KB, though...maybe they simply reserve it all?
 
8 x 1Mb = 8Mb, 640K conventional, 384K reserved/shadowing, 7Mb XMS - all accounted for.
Most 386's I've owned let you use the 384Kb as (or part of it) XMS, guess that one doesn't.


I assumed those chips above the SIMMs were high speed cache.

Edit: although I just went back and you said it started with 1.6Mb - that is pretty weird unless it had 8x256 in there before?? oh well awesome it runs!
 
The chips are the cache, yeah (128KB) - I just wasn't sure if conventional memory might not've been somewhere else on the board. But I haven't even tried booting with no SIMMs; I'm willing to buy the "1MB reserved" explanation.

Fortunately, 8MB is more than this system should ever be needing anyway.
 
Eh if it was me I load her up with the max of 16mb, since its an SX system. Only downside is having to wait at boot for it to count it all! >.<
 
It's actually a 386DX equivalent, it maxes out at 32MB. I actually have that amount in SIMMs on hand, but I'm reserving them for my Macintosh SE/30; of the two systems, I know which one is far more likely to ever come close to using that amount of memory...

(Though I suppose I could split the different and give them 20MB apiece!)
 
I happen to have a few if you need a couple (10 sticks, think 60ns). I was going to toss some stuff up for sale this weekend hopefully, and can include a few pair of 16mb 30pins if you want.
 
GAH. I am having a hell of a time getting a boot disk to work. I've tried several different system images on several different disks with several different drives and several different controllers, and they all fail. Not immediately enough to suggest a catastrophic hardware failure; everything runs merrily along through POST and successfully loads the boot sector off at least two of the system images. That seems to be as far as it gets; Xenix and FreeDOS get stuck in some kind of read-from-disk loop but never accomplish anything, and the various MS-DOSes all display some variant of "non-system disk or disk error."

I don't get it; this seems like a pretty standard PC BIOS, so I wouldn't think it should be responding in a non-standard enough way to screw up five different bootloaders, but I can't see that it's a hardware problem, as I've tried multiple combinations of drive, cable, and controller, and anyway if it were a hardware issue I can't see how it would even get far enough to load the boot sector, unless for some reason it's completely failing to move the drive head anywhere but track 0, sector 0, but what kind of sense does that make?

Can anybody help me figure out what's going wrong here?

Edit: Alternatively, it could be that I was lazy and did not account for the possibility that a known-good drive might have developed a problem once I'd verified the controllers were working, and then spent hours banging my head against the wall for no good reason. That might be what happened, sure.
 
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By the way, Wikipedia claims that the Super386 suffered from errors and incompatibilities compared to the real deal, but Google hardly turns up any information on the chip, let alone its compatibility. Any idea what they're talking about?
 
Blargh. I got a 4.3GB hard drive (Quantum Fireball SE) to serve as a new hard drive for this machine. The BIOS allows for a custom hard drive type that takes very large CHS values with no complaint (up to 32GB!) so I punched in the values printed on the drive faceplate. After a little fiddling around with the master/slave jumpers it was good to go, and even loaded the boot sector off the drive with no problem, though it didn't actually boot (FDISK showed an HPFS partition, and an OS/2 boot disk mounted it, but couldn't read it, so I expect it got corrupted somewhere along the line.)

Unfortunately, I've been having a heck of a time getting it partitioned for DOS. Even though the BIOS calculated the drive size correctly, FDISK (both the MS-DOS and FreeDOS versions) only recognized a 284MB capacity. I took it out and put it in my XP box and was able to set up a couple 2GB partitions, but once I'd done that, the 386's BIOS no longer recognizes the drive! I'm a little baffled by this; I can only assume that XP does something to the MBR that this old BIOS doesn't like. I'm going to try throwing it in my Windows 98 box and hope that that can help things, but I'm a little lost here...
 
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Update: Okay, I'm pretty sure this is just a BIOS issue; the Pentium box handled it with no problems whatsoever. Aggravating that the 386 can understand large drive sizes, but is only interested in them academically. Probably also means I nuked a working HPFS partition I could've dug through, but oh well, moving on. I've seen a bit around here about there being an XT-IDE BIOS overlay that enables the use of large drives on older machines; is this just a drop-in-and-go process? I do have a 3Com 3C515-TX NIC in this machine that has a ROM socket; is there a possibility someone could write me an EEPROM for it?
 
Just curious, but why not try out the quantum overlay first? Its free and requires little if any effort. Should work for what you want to do. :)

Quantum Diagnostic
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/12/29/2243661/Vintage_pc/powermax.rar

Quantum ontrack 9.52
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/12/29/2243661/Vintage_pc/DC952.rar

Just make sure to back up the overlay onto your install diskette. That way in case anything happens you can restore the overlay easily with the repair feature. :thumbsup: Also I believe it requires windows to image the diskettes. Both are bootable btw if I recall correctly. It should also set the settings in CMOS for you, well it does on MOST systems...
 
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I don't think that'll help, since the BIOS doesn't even want to talk to the drive anymore...besides, it looks like the XT-IDE BIOS is free except for the EEPROM cost (if I've picked this up correctly from discussion here,) and that should circumvent the problem entirely.

General question: I am understanding this correctly from other threads, that the XT-IDE BIOS extension will work with other ATA controllers, and I can use the ROM socket on my NIC to install it? Does anyone know what kind of EEPROMs the above NIC accepts? (Ideally, could someone program it for me? I have an EEPROM burner but I don't know that I have the right size ROM.)
 
Well depends which version you pick. Some are 8kb , AT based is 16kb. So 27c64 for 16kb. Should be able to use a 27c128/27c256 on almost any nic, just copy the bin 2x/4x into 1 file, or append with all 0's, and use that 32k/64k bin on the eprom programmer.

The overlay works regardless if the bios see's it full size correctly, be it the Quantum overlay or XT-IDE. Set the bios to 1023 16 63 or 1024 16 63 (think type 40?)


Or you can buy one of these, I am myself, it basically works the same as using the eprom in a nic, but uses flash instead. Mucho easier to update!
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?30390-Universal-8-bit-ISA-ROM-Boards
 
PROGRESS! I burned an XT-IDE 2.0 EEPROM and stuck it in the NIC; the system now recognizes the full drive capacity. Got it formatting and MS-DOS 6.22 install disks a-writing. :D

Still haven't imaged the original drive...I'm too damn lazy sometimes.

Now I just gotta figure out what to do with the other 2.3 GB...think I might give OS/2 a shot, just for kicks.
 
Well, got just about all of the basic setup done; it's booting DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups, the AWE32 is installed and working (killed way too much time playing around with this last night,) and the CD drive is functioning fine which means no more copying stuff over via floppy disk. Also got a ton of games loaded on it, though a lot of them I haven't even unpacked yet.

It's not quite done; I still have to get networking set up, and I still haven't been able to track down a Windows 3.1 driver for the video card outside of DriverGuide (I'd like SVGA resolutions, but I don't like the idea of giving them money on principle.) I also haven't given OS2 a shot yet. But hey, this is still quite a bit of progress.

(I'm a little peeved that Descent doesn't want to run at a playable framerate, even with the quality cranked down - I swear I've run it at half a playable rate on a 386SX-16, and this is twice the clock and twice the bus width...argh. DOOM works, but it'd be better if I had a 40MHz processor, I think...)
 
Which video card driver do you need from driverguide? I have a paid membership and I'd be happy to get it out of their site and send it to you. Or which video card is it? I may have drivers here for win 3.11, I have a few of em.
 
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