Hmm, what are the odds that I'd run into a thread about this computer still active? I just got my portable II today at a yard sale.
The thing has the 20mb hard drive, in addition to a HardCard 20 (it's another 20mb hard drive, cannot act as primary AFAIK). 640K ram (no expansion), battery still gives over 2 volts. No coprocessor.
So here's the deal - I don't know what's going on with the hard drive... whenever I turn it on, I get: 1701(C) -- Controller #1 error
Also, trying to boot off the hard drive (I assume the old owner left dos there) waits for a while (with minimal disk activity - a few clicks/lights), then says Bad command interpreter or so.
I couldn't see anything amazingly wrong on the inside of this thing, and it seems to be remembering bios values (it hasn't yelled at me, but I can't check for sure atm).
I had the thought of re-installing dos, but I realized after "formatting" the disk (/me wonders if that actually did anything) using fastart that my only dos disks are IBM dos 5, and that's if I could find them (have no idea where they ended up).
So, I'm stuck - how do I make this error go away?
BTW, I have the diagnostics disks - 6 disks came with this computer, the 2 diagnostics disks, the 2 program disks, the fastart disk, and one more personal disk - unlabeled and unbootable. I'd give you all these disks as images, if I had a 5+1/4" drive on a computer with a network... I'll try to fix that eventually, but no help right now (I'll need that for myself later - hope to do some 286 programming with this machine).
oh yeah, and I do also have the manuals