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Commodore PC30-III

Thomas Olivaux

New Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2010
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8
Hello there!

I'm trying to revive a Commodore PC30-III thoses days, it's complete (stock configuration with monochrome screen, 5.25" and 20MB HDD) but the case (fortunatly not the bezel) and the screen have been painted in blue! The computer starts just fine, battery is dead as expected and... i'm stuck because it won't boot to floppy or hdd. But it tries to boot from floppy, do you think it's just a dirty drive?

More important : I'm looking for the setup floppy image, I mean the floppy to enter "bios" and set up HDD and the few available settings. Do you know where to find it? Google is not my friend on this one :(

See you,

Thomas

PS : is anyone is interested in this 286 computer, I made a few high resolution pics, I can't find some on the web.
 
Remove the battery and clean up any damage with lemon juice or vinegar.

The floppy drive head might just need a cleaning, I've had to do that before. Cleaning discs work but I wouldn't waste your money on them when a q-tip and rubbing alcohol works better. If that doesn't work then your disks could be bad or drive head out of alignment, hopefully not the latter since it's not easy to fix.

Is the hard drive powering up? Old hard drives can seize when they haven't been used for while, so you could try taking the top off and giving it a small helping hand.

It might not have any kind of BIOS with hard drive settings. Sometimes that was all done on the hard drive controller or manually with jumpers/dip switches.
 
Last edited:
... it's complete (stock configuration with monochrome screen, 5.25" and 20MB HDD) ...
... battery is dead as expected ...
... i'm stuck because it won't boot to floppy or hdd. But it tries to boot from floppy, do you think it's just a dirty drive?
Some computers with a 1.2MB floppy drive, will not boot from a 1.2MB floppy if the BIOS configuration (SETUP) is lost.
In such a situation, the computer may be able to boot from a 360K floppy (e.g. so that a BIOS configuration [SETUP] program can be run).
The IBM AT is an example of that.
 
Hello,

First, my PC35-III has got a 720KB 3"1/2 instead of an HD 1.44MB : are you sure your floppy drive is HD ?
On my motherboard, there is a DALLAS 1287 that i reworked.
This is the setup disk (original) with MS-DOS 3.30, ATI EGA drivers and the setup.exe file.
Bad news : it's in French language (i'm French, nobody is perfect... :D)
It's an HD image, so if your floppy is DD, you will have to work on it.

PC30IIIF.RAR here

You will have to use Disk Copy Fast (MS-DOS) or WinImage to write this image onto a floppy disk.
 
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