Tandy 1000 SX Help?

[AJWINDMEYER]

Hi, I am new to the forums so many may not know who I am...

My name is AJ and I am 16 years old. I just received a early Tandy 1000 SX for my vintage pc collection. It has a ISA Driven 8bit IDE drive (20 MB Western Digital) but the pc don't seem to see it. I have never worked with a Tandy before. Can I enter the system BIOS? I don't have any boot floppys thought I have tons of software for it. Can anyone help?

It has 640 kb of memory, does start, and has a16 color magnavox monitor.

 

[AJWINDMEYER]

Also thought I would add it has dual 5 1/4 floppys and a intel 8088 in it

 

[Agent Orange]

Hi, I am new to the forums so many may not know who I am...

My name is AJ and I am 16 years old. I just received a early Tandy 1000 SX for my vintage pc collection. It has a ISA Driven 8bit IDE drive (20 MB Western Digital) but the pc don't seem to see it. I have never worked with a Tandy before. Can I enter the system BIOS? I don't have any boot floppys thought I have tons of software for it. Can anyone help?

It has 640 kb of memory, does start, and has a16 color magnavox monitor.

Hi AJ and welcome to the forum. You might want to head over to the OldSkool site (http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/system.html) and sift though their files to find your Tandy version MS-DOS 3.2 floppies. As far as the BIOS is concerned, there is no user configurable options available. Your 1000SX originally came with 2 DS/DD 360 KB floppy drives and a 8088 CPU running at 7.16 MHz. The only upgrade path for the CPU would be the NEC V20 (10 MHZ version recommended), which you can find on eBay from time to time. If possible, post a picture of your HD controller with the hard drive attached and describe the cable setup for us. Give us as much info as you can on tour controller card and HD. If you have a problem locating the system floppies for your 1000SX, send me a PM and I'll try to work something out with you.

 

[mojorific]

Hi, I am new to the forums so many may not know who I am...

My name is AJ and I am 16 years old. I just received a early Tandy 1000 SX for my vintage pc collection. It has a ISA Driven 8bit IDE drive (20 MB Western Digital) but the pc don't seem to see it. I have never worked with a Tandy before. Can I enter the system BIOS? I don't have any boot floppys thought I have tons of software for it. Can anyone help?

It has 640 kb of memory, does start, and has a 16 color magnavox monitor.

There is no bios that is accessible on the Tandy 1000 SX (although it does have one). The Tandy does a check for fixed disks on boot, and if it doesn't find one, it moves to the A: drive to check for a MS-DOS boot disk. The hard drive is probably an XT IDE drive - which is not compatible with a standard IDE drive that you find in machines from the 1990's+.

I would do the following: Open up the Tandy (two screws on the front will allow you to slide the case off). Remove the card that the hard drive is connected to, and reseat it. If it is a hard drive card (hard drive and the controller card together in one), you may be able to get it to recognize again if you manually turn the drive motor to free it from being stuck. The motors on these hard drives can get stuck after years of being idle. Close it up and test it again to see if the drive is recognized.

If this does not work you have a couple of options:

1) Get floppies with MS-DOS 3.2 or 3.3 and boot from that.
2) Get an XT-IDE card with a compact flash drive. Lo-tec sells the boards but you have to solder them yourself. Long-term this will be the best option if you want to be able to play around and transfer old software on these machine.

Enjoy your vintage system!

 

[Agent Orange]

There is no bios that is accessible on the Tandy 1000 SX (although it does have one). The Tandy does a check for fixed disks on boot, and if it doesn't find one, it moves to the A: drive to check for a MS-DOS boot disk. The hard drive is probably an XT IDE drive - which is not compatible with a standard IDE drive that you find in machines from the 1990's+.

I would do the following: Open up the Tandy (two screws on the front will allow you to slide the case off). Remove the card that the hard drive is connected to, and reseat it. If it is a hard drive card (hard drive and the controller card together in one), you may be able to get it to recognize again if you manually turn the drive motor to free it from being stuck. The motors on these hard drives can get stuck after years of being idle. Close it up and test it again to see if the drive is recognized.

If this does not work you have a couple of options:

1) Get floppies with MS-DOS 3.2 or 3.3 and boot from that.
2) Get an XT-IDE card with a compact flash drive. Lo-tec sells the boards but you have to solder them yourself. Long-term this will be the best option if you want to be able to play around and transfer old software on these machine.

Enjoy your vintage system!

I'm wondering if you saw my post????