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Help With a DTK 286 Clone Resurrection

J

JOHNMORR

Member
Joined
Apr 15, 2012
Messages
24
Location
West Virginia
I have an old 286 clone with a DTK PTM-1230C motherboard [1988] that I'm trying to bring back to life.
The main issue is the battery. The manual states that I can hook up a 4 AA cell external pack. However, before I stored it years ago, I removed the barrel-type Varta battery and discarded it, not paying too much attention to its rating.
The only Varta batteries I can find now are 3.5v. So my question is, could the original Varta have been ~6v, or is the battery requirement not critical and the external 6v pack will work?

Also, I would like to mount an IDE hard drive in it, but I have no ISA IDE controller board. Plenty of IDE drives and MFM controllers. The motherboard already has serial and parallel ports on it, so all I'm looking for is an IDE HDD controller that supports floppy drive(s) as well. Anyone out there have one?

Grateful for any advice!
 
Your system should start without any battery, try this first. Usually batteries are 3.6v, but don't worry with this right now. About the IDE controller, use any 16bit multi i/o, disable the serial/parallel ports (to use the ones from your motherboard) and you're fine.
 
If you just want a plain 16-bit IDE+floppy card, Jameco is still offering one for $3.95 if you don't mind being restricted to about 500MB HD and 1.44MB floppies.

If the manual says you can use a 4AA pack, then you should be able to. In most of the systems like that, the 4AA connects to a different pin and the different voltage is correctly handled.
 
Thanks for the information, guys.
The Jameco card is just what I was looking for, and cheap enough!
My concern about the battery was that there were some minor discrepancies between the manual and the board itself. Just being cautious.

Thanks again!
 
The Varta battery I have here is 3.6v.

There may be a jumper on the motherboard that has to be set to external battery. I think that ties into external batteries not being recharged by the computer.
 
I've got the 10MHz DTK version manual (PTM-1000).

On that board, the external battery jumper is J24 and is 4 pins. Pin 1 is +6VDC, pin 2 is NC and pins 3 and 4 are ground. There is also this note:

On new versions of the PTM-1000 the lithum battery has been replaced by a blue barrel-shaped rechargable battery (sic)
Click to expand...

My rule of thumb is if a board has a battery soldered on, remove it. The amount of damage that a leaky battery can create cannot be overstated. I even remove coin cells from later boards because of this.

4xAA batteries will do just fine for the ones with a 4 pin header for an external battery. There usually is no jumper to select one or the other.
 
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