• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Found old 5162

geekygator

New Member
Joined
Jun 28, 2008
Messages
8
Hi, new forum!

I found an old IBM 5162 with the green monochrome 5151 monitor in a back room today with some sort of printer, plugged it in and turned it on, and to my surprise it worked. It is my mom's (she used to work for IBM), and I havn't gotten to question her about it yet.

It seems to have booted up fine, checked all 640k of memory, then presented me with a console which I had no idea how to use. It says it is running IBM Personal Computer Basic C1.10, Copyright 1981. The screen is blank except for, near the bottom, a few F-key labels, like LIST, RUN, some other stuff, then KEY and SCREEN. I tried pressing a few, tried out a few of the console commands familiar to me, but all it spat out was SYNTAX ERROR then Ok. I'd just like to tinker a bit, get how to move files, maybe run a program or two. The only floppies I've found is Turbo Tax Personal 1990 edition, so I guess if nothing else I could do taxes from 18 years ago. A quick users' guide would be much appreciated.

I noticed somewhere else that the 5162 has a 286 processor, 640k of ram, and a 20MB hard drive, which seems like a perfect setup for MS-DOS or the equivalent. Is there anything I could do with this, especially considering that it only has 5 1/2" floppy drives. (PS- is there any way to write 5 1/4" floppies now-a-days? A USB drive would be pretty slick, but I doubt there is a real market for them... ).

TL;DR: I've got a 5162 with IBM PC BASIC, what can I do with it. Can I write 5.25" floppies.

Thanks
 
Put simply, your 5162 has booted into BASIC (located on the motherboard) because the 5162 couldn't find a diskette or hard drive to boot from.
A 20 MB hard drive was standard on the 5162, and so the question is, has that drive failed or has the drive been removed? Your "especially considering that it only has 5 1/2" floppy drives." suggests that you know that there is no hard drive, however your statement might have meant to communicate that the only type of floppy drives in your 5162 are of 5.25" size.

Do you know if your 5162 has a hard drive? If you're not sure, give us a picture of the 5162 front.
 
Do you know if your 5162 has a hard drive? If you're not sure, give us a picture of the 5162 front.

Oops, sorry, meant 5 1/4".

I questioned my mom some more, she said that she is "sure" it had a DOS on it, yet it boots to the BASIC, so I suppose that means the hard drive has failed. Unless to boot to DOS you still had to have a floppy with DOS on it when you turned it on?

Images:
Front:
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/6796/img0086uo6.jpg
Whole Thing: (Yeah, kinda messy)
http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/4958/img0088bm1.jpg


There is a light on a panel to the right of the two floppy drives that comes on when I turn it on, not sure if that means hard drive or what. It does make a lot of hard-drive like noises when I turn it on.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, that's a hard drive alright.

Ok, so, there are 3 possibilities;

1 - It has nothing on it.
2 - It has something on it but the boot sectors have leaked away
3 - It has something on it and it's bootable, but, the spin motor has a case of "stiction"

It'd probably go with the stiction thing. Do a forum search on the word and you will find several threads discussing it and cures.
 
Next time, please don't embed Xbox huge pictures. Some of our members do have dial up.

i'd be more concerned with the fact that a tiny handful of our members are browsing this page with arachne on an 8088 :p

in which case, they'd kill for anything resembling dial-up speeds.
 
Do you get any error messages on boot? The 5162 is a 286, so may have lost system settings due to a flat battery.

that is most likely why it's booting into BASIC, yes.

since i don't believe those particular 286's have a BIOS, you'll need a setup disk for that.

it's not the original, but this should work fine: http://www.computercraft.com/progs/gsetup.zip

other members here who know more about that particular box can help you with more detail than myself, that link is the best i can do for you.

those 5162's look exactly like an IBM XT. i've seen them compared to a Mustang LX 5.0 vs. Mustang GT 5.0 rather accurately. "all the dash without the flash" :D
 
Last edited:
The 5162 is also known as the XT model 286 (or XT/286).

That's a bright display - can't turn down the brightness?

According to the the 5162 slide show at http://www.yesterpc.com/Hardware/IBM 5162/slideshow/thumb.htm , the 5162 does have a battery. Reading Mueller's 'Upgrading & Repairing PCs' suggests that the battery is just to backup the clock, but the earlier 5162 thread of http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=2736 indicates that the 5162 has a CMOS setup just like the 5170 (as expected) which is battery supported.

So it is possible that the battery in your 5162 needs replacing (as Dongfeng suggested). Indicative of that would be error/warning messages on start up like "run SETUP" ? Do you see anything like that?

After such battery replacement, you need to run some special configuration software (like the software that Mike provided a link to) to reconfigure your 5162 (inform it as to the type of hard drive, etc.)
But I suspect that you don't have the capability to transfer that software from the Internet to a bootable 5.25" disk. Is that the case?

We're expecting that your 5162 has a Seagate ST-225 hard drive, in which case you will be configuring your system for a TYPE 2 hard drive (or if your battery doesn't need replacing, confirming that type 2 is presently set). It's a good idea for you to confirm for us that your 5162 has an ST-225.
 
yeah, the disk is going to be an issue for him. what he could try is if he has another newer 5.25" drive diskette anywhere (that can do 720K or 1.2M) he can install it in a newer machine running a win32 OS. if he sets the BIOS to treat it as a 360K drive, he should be able to make a bootable disk in Windows with WinImage or a similar program, and throw the SETUP program on it as well.

he would of course have to move that newer drive to the 5162 to read it, as a true 360K drive isn't going to be able to read a disk that was made in a higher density drive.

another similar alternative would be to install a 1.44 MB 3-1/2" floppy in the 5162, and get a new floppy controller for the machine. may not be a bad idea to just get one that handles an IDE hard drive as well, since the MFM HD in that thing is almost certainly on it's last legs if it even works at all any more.

since there should be 16-bit slots in there he should be able to use any 16-bit ISA controller card he finds. they're dirt cheap if you do a google search or go on ebay. i'm talking like well under $5 type cheap.

probably buy it now 99 cents on ebay, but watch out for the a-holes who charge $20 shipping. this is almost certainly the best route to go here, just pull the old stuff out and put a nice sexy new IDE drive in there.

to run the BIOS SETUP the easiest route is a bootable 3-1/2" 1.44 MB w/ the setup on it. since the PC is going to try and use it as a 5-1/4" 360 KB drive, what you will need to do is make the bootable disk with Caldera DR-DOS 7.x because it will read sector 0's boot code which will bypass the BIOS for floppy for future reads and writes and you can use 1.44 MB without doing anything special. this has worked on several 8088-based machines for me with 16-bit drive controller cards. (no you can't use the hard drive port on it, but the floppy port works entirely from the 8-bit pins so an 8088 ISA bus will work)

if you go the 3-1/2" route, get DR-DOS 7.02 here: ftp://ftp.fsn.hu/pub/OpenDOS/DR-DOS.702/IMAGES

for your purposes, you'll only need the first one. there should be a little bit of free space on the disk after writing the image to it. copy the SETUP program i linked to in my other post on to that, deleting any other SETUP.EXE file that may be there.

then after putting a new drive controller card in there and connecting a 3-1/2" drive, boot from the disk you made. when it says "Starting Caldera DR-DOS..." hit F5 quick-like. give it a moment, it'll ask for the location of command.com

just type COMMAND.COM and hit enter.

when you get the A:\> prompt, type SETUP.EXE and the program should run for you. good luck!
 
Last edited:
Next time, please don't embed Xbox huge pictures. Some of our members do have dial up.

Oops, sorry. I changed them to links, next time I'll resize to something more normal.

Do you get any error messages on boot? The 5162 is a 286, so may have lost system settings due to a flat battery.

Nope, no error messages. It just counts up the ram and says that 640K is OK, then gives a welcome-type message about IBM PC BASIC.

since i don't believe those particular 286's have a BIOS, you'll need a setup disk for that.

it's not the original, but this should work fine: http://www.computercraft.com/progs/gsetup.zip

those 5162's look exactly like an IBM XT. i've seen them compared to a Mustang LX 5.0 vs. Mustang GT 5.0 rather accurately. "all the dash without the flash" :D

No BIOS, from what I can tell. From what my mom told me, the 5162 is just a AT in an XT box, and they were pushing it on IBM employees with a nice discount back in the mid 80's.

That's a bright display - can't turn down the brightness?

According to the the 5162 slide show at http://www.yesterpc.com/Hardware/IBM 5162/slideshow/thumb.htm , the 5162 does have a battery. Reading Mueller's 'Upgrading & Repairing PCs' suggests that the battery is just to backup the clock, but the earlier 5162 thread of http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?t=2736 indicates that the 5162 has a CMOS setup just like the 5170 (as expected) which is battery supported.

So it is possible that the battery in your 5162 needs replacing (as Dongfeng suggested). Indicative of that would be error/warning messages on start up like "run SETUP" ? Do you see anything like that?

After such battery replacement, you need to run some special configuration software (like the software that Mike provided a link to) to reconfigure your 5162 (inform it as to the type of hard drive, etc.)
But I suspect that you don't have the capability to transfer that software from the Internet to a bootable 5.25" disk. Is that the case?

We're expecting that your 5162 has a Seagate ST-225 hard drive, in which case you will be configuring your system for a TYPE 2 hard drive (or if your battery doesn't need replacing, confirming that type 2 is presently set). It's a good idea for you to confirm for us that your 5162 has an ST-225.

As above, no error messages. I don't have any ability to write 5.25" disks, though I can call some people I know who might have one. To see what type of drive it is without having the setup software, I will have to open it up, I assume.

My mom claims she has all the original floppies in a box somewhere, so I'm going to try to find those first. If I can't, then I'll follow what you said, probably try to hook up a 3.5" floppy drive to it, since that would make writing new things a hell of a lot easier.
 
The controller of my 5162 happily accepts a 3,5" HD 1,44 floppydrive, also to boot from.
That should make things easier.
The Gsetup program is just an exe file, it doesn't need to be written as a disk image.

Battery pack is somewhat peculiar if I remember- I was planning opening up my case anyway today, I might have a look (depending on attic temperatures..)
 
The controller of my 5162 happily accepts a 3,5" HD 1,44 floppydrive, also to boot from.
From my experiments on the 5170, the first BIOS revision won't allow a 5170 with default CMOS settings to boot from a 1.44M disk. The third BIOS does. Since the 5162 postdates the third BIOS revision of a 5170, we can expect that a 5162 with default CMOS settings can boot from a 1.44M disk. I expect that is what is meant by the "full" in Mueller's, "Most people do not know that full BIOS ROM support for these 1.44M drives is provided on the XT Model 286" in his 'Upgrading & Repairing PCs' book.

From what my mom told me, the 5162 is just a AT in an XT box
Essentially, but faster (zero wait states).

As above, no error messages
That suggests that your battery is okay.
If the CMOS settings have a hard drive set up (type <> 0) and there is a hardware problem with the hard drive, we would have expected you to see 17xx type errors. I think running GSETUP (or similar) to look at the current CMOS settings is the next step (maybe somehow the drive type has been set to zero).
Still a possibility is Druid6900's suggestion of the drives contents being in question.
 
Ah, so your controller takes a 3.5"? Then would something like this (http://cgi.ebay.com/1-44-MB-3-5-DES...yZ116268QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) work?

I did take out the battery, it is a fairly odd type. Though luckily, it seems to be used in some types of cameras, so RadioShack carries it. $10, but thats not too much.

Yes, I got a standard floppy like that in it (I sprayed it black, though :) ).
Don't pay too much for it, they will probably throw it at you at the thrift shop.
Its worth a try, you should be easily ably to install it in a more modern machine to make a DOS disk with gsetup on it.


The 5162 you have shows two drives, probably one HD 1,2M(top) and a 360K low density.
 
Right, well then I'll try picking up a cheap IDE 3.5" floppy drive. Getting new battery too, just in case.
 
Since you are not getting an error message and it won't boot off the HD, you might want to check, while you are in Fdisk, that the primary partition is set active.

If it isn't, you probably wouldn't get an error, but, what you would have would be, essentially, a non-removable 20MB floppy drive called C:
 
Quick look at hard drive types in CMOS

Quick look at hard drive types in CMOS

Assuming that your battery is good and the CMOS has been set up to something (otherwise you would have had a CMOS type error message displayed), there is a quick way for us to determine the hard drive types set in the CMOS, rather than waiting around for GSETUP (or equivalent).

Since BASIC is firing up, we'll get you to run the following BASIC program which will interrogate part of the CMOS setup. The program is valid for a 5170, and I'm sure that it is also valid for a 5162 (I don't think that IBM would have deviated from the 5170 standard for the 5162).

At the prompt that BASIC is giving you, type in the following three lines exactly as shown:

Code:
30 out 112,18
40 print inp(113)
run

When you press the ENTER key after typing in the "run" line, a number will appear under the "run".
Tell us what that number is. We're expecting "32" (hard drive 0 = type 2, no hard drive 1).

(Note that we're still under the assumption that your hard drive is of type 2 [such as the ST-225])
 
did replace the battery, though... oops.
If you took more than about 2 minutes to replace the battery, then the CMOS contents would have been lost (timing based on the 5170), and you would be seeing a "161 - System options not set - Run SETUP" error message. Are you seeing that error message now?
 
Back
Top