Hello everybody! Does this look familiar to anybody?

[drpepper843]

No HDD installed, but I have a couple that might work? Posts to bios but I have no clue where to go from there.

Any insight as to what i have here? Thanks so much

 

[drpepper843]

Front of the unit

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Again, you have a generic 386 system with a few expansion cards. It appears the keyboard connects to the front of it. Are you wanting to install a hard drive and an operating system?

 

[drpepper843]

Yes I would love to do that I just dont know how

Thanks for the quick reply

 

[Stone]

It's got an IDE card and ribbon cable. Plug one in and give it a try.

 

[DOS lives on!!]

First you need to find a working hard drive controller card (if there's not already one there) and hard drive (both are IDE). A good hard drive for that system would be in the 300mb-2gb range. Then it's a matter of setting it up for the computer to recognize and use it.

Technically, you can use just about any sized hard drive in it, although maybe a Dynamic Drive Overlay may be needed. We'll go there if needed.

 

[drpepper843]

yeah, the first problem im running into is setting the correct parameters

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Here's the parameters for the drive:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/legacy/Legacy.asp?Model=AC22100

 

[drpepper843]

Yes ive found that as well ... and I applied the appropriate numbers but it still did not recognize the HDD

Im very familiar with building newer PCs (year 2000+) and ive fixed probable a hundred PCs over the last 2 years. Im familiar with SATA and IDE connections and also have every cable/drive/HDD/Memory I could possibly need to get this computer running. I just dont know how to set up the bios or work dos commands

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Boot it with an MS-DOS boot disk and see if FDISK will see the disk.

 

[drpepper843]

Well i tried several times to write a ms dos boot disk with no success. But that was on win 7. Ill try XP when i get a chance

 

[DOS lives on!!]

A DOS 6.22 self-executing image from allbootdisks.com works for me on Windows 7. I'm using a USB floppy drive. XP will probably work better.

 

[Stone]

Well i tried several times to write a ms dos boot disk with no success. But that was on win 7. Ill try XP when i get a chance

There is no such animal. You need a real DOS disk. Win 98 or ME would suffice but not XP or 7.

 

[drpepper843]

yeah those are the ones that i downloaded but ill try it again. i just kept getting an "access denied" error

 

[drpepper843]

The post meant I was trying to write the ms dos disk ON win 7. not that i was trying to boot the 386 WITH win 7 lol

 

[Stone]

The post meant I was trying to write the ms dos disk ON win 7. not that i was trying to boot the 386 WITH win 7 lol

OK, are you trying to write a disk from an .IMG file? I've had great success writing/creating .IMG files but I use a DOS program to write/create them. But I know others are using Windows programs the do this as well.

 

[drpepper843]

Im trying to write this

to this.....................

Using this.................

Im guessing its not working because im using Win7 home premium?

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Well, those are macintosh formatted disks. Try using IBM (PC) formatted disks.

 

[Stone]

Well, those are macintosh formatted disks. Try using IBM (PC) formatted disks.

He could just reformat them.

 

[drpepper843]