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XT Clone

R

Ron22

New Member
Joined
Aug 25, 2012
Messages
3
I recently received a XT Clone with monitor. I hooked every thing up and turned it on.
Does the memory check 640KB ok then tries to boot off the floppy then No Boot disk is found. Makes sense since there is nothing in the floppy drive.
My question is there is a harddrive but it does not try to read from it. What do I need to do to change this?
I took out the 2 cards (Flopppy and hardrive) and reseated them but made no differance.
There is a Dipswitch bank to change things. There is no info though any idea how to find what the settings are?
I have not used an XT since well since they were new so I have to relearn everything.
Thanks for any help
Ron
 
First, you're gonna need a boot disk, unless, of course, the HD/controller is not connected correctly. Until you get that you won't be able to check the status of the HD/controller. Then you can run FDISK and see if there is a partition on the HD.
 
Ron22 said:
So now were do I find a boot disk.
Click to expand...


It's a good idea to see if the Floppy Drive light is on when the computer is seeking disk, if not, then you will have to check for correct dip settings, take a look in stason, and try to find your motherboard, also take a look if there's any jumper on the controller card. About the hard drive, does it spins? Could you see any acess light (usually in front of the drive there's a green or red led)?

Are you from USA? You could ask for a boot disk from members here, I'm sure someone will send one to you at a low cost. Writing a boot disk will be a bit hard, because your XT clone uses 360KB (probably) disks, and it's not that easy to make 5 1/4 drives works on moderns computers.

If you leave the disk door open, the motherboard will try to boot from hard drive.

Another useful tip, do not FORGET do clean the heads of your floppy drive before inserting any disk, usually the floppy drive heads of long time stored computers becomes dirty, and will ruin your diskettes if you don't clean before use.

By the way, here is a boot disk.
 
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Also, when the computer starts, do you see an error message at all? That error may be a number - "1700" is common for a generic hard drive error.

It helps to know what we are dealing with. What is the make/model of the hard drive? What is the make/model of the hard drive controller card?

Ron22 said:
I recently received a XT Clone with monitor.
Click to expand...
Because the history is not known, the problem cause could be virtually anything. It's just something that needs to be considered as part of diagnosis. For example, a previous owner may have disassembled the machine and then reassembled it incorrectly.

Ron22 said:
There is a Dipswitch bank to change things. There is no info though any idea how to find what the settings are?
Click to expand...
If you don't find your motherboard listed at stason (as lucasdaytona suggested), then note that it is quite probable that your XT clone's switch block is set the same as that for the IBM XT. Details are on pages 1123/1124 (PDF pages 1155/1156) of the document found [here].
 
Right. Your first real task will be to find, create, borrow, someone who has a bootable floppy and then you can see if the hard drive is readable, detectable, etc using fdisk, dir, etc. Could be the drive needs a check or isn't spinning and has a stuck head/arm. Do you hear the hard drive spin up when the computer boots? Do you hear it click or make any noises like it's trying to access the drive?
 
It's funny to see a lot of people(including me) trying to help a member that does not show up for for almost 3 days. I bet that he got the problem solved.
 
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