jacobtohahn
Experienced Member
Hi all,
I received an IBM PC 5170 as a donation recently and just got around to checking if it works and restoring it if necessary. I did a quick check of the condition under the cover (it was attic stored in hot North Carolina summers for at least 25 years) and found it to be very good, only a little dusty, so I put a DOS boot disk in the drive and it fired right up after an error saying that SETUP needed to be run. Next, I tried accessing the hard drive under DOS and found nothing mapped to the C drive and "no fixed disks present" when running FDISK, so obviously the hard drive wasn't working right. It did spin up on startup but I heard no activity, so I thought the SETUP issue had something to do with it. Unfortunately, I can't find my diagnostics disk anywhere, so I went with the BASIC method of setting up the computer. I removed all disks from the drives, restarted, and waited for the computer to boot to BASIC... but it never did. I got "Non system disk or disk error" on the screen instead. Same thing after removing power from all drives.
Obviously something was up, so I did a much closer inspection on the inside and found a few really weird things. There was no IBM HDD/Floppy controller card. Instead, it had been replaced by some cards taken from an Epson Equity computer (see the section titled "HDD Controller WHDC" in this PDF). The BIOS chips had been replaced, also with chips from an Epson. No wonder it didn't boot to BASIC. I reset the HDD card jumpers to factory defaults according to the PDF in an effort to get the drive working, but no luck.
So here's my question: how can I get this hard drive to work? I can't boot into BASIC to set the drive type, and I don't even know if that would work because the BIOS chips had been replaced. Any ideas or info would be appreciated. I don't want to have to program IBM BIOS chips and buy an IBM HDD/Floppy controller card!
P.S.: The hard drive is a CMI 6426, type number 2, 20MB, if that helps.
I received an IBM PC 5170 as a donation recently and just got around to checking if it works and restoring it if necessary. I did a quick check of the condition under the cover (it was attic stored in hot North Carolina summers for at least 25 years) and found it to be very good, only a little dusty, so I put a DOS boot disk in the drive and it fired right up after an error saying that SETUP needed to be run. Next, I tried accessing the hard drive under DOS and found nothing mapped to the C drive and "no fixed disks present" when running FDISK, so obviously the hard drive wasn't working right. It did spin up on startup but I heard no activity, so I thought the SETUP issue had something to do with it. Unfortunately, I can't find my diagnostics disk anywhere, so I went with the BASIC method of setting up the computer. I removed all disks from the drives, restarted, and waited for the computer to boot to BASIC... but it never did. I got "Non system disk or disk error" on the screen instead. Same thing after removing power from all drives.
Obviously something was up, so I did a much closer inspection on the inside and found a few really weird things. There was no IBM HDD/Floppy controller card. Instead, it had been replaced by some cards taken from an Epson Equity computer (see the section titled "HDD Controller WHDC" in this PDF). The BIOS chips had been replaced, also with chips from an Epson. No wonder it didn't boot to BASIC. I reset the HDD card jumpers to factory defaults according to the PDF in an effort to get the drive working, but no luck.
So here's my question: how can I get this hard drive to work? I can't boot into BASIC to set the drive type, and I don't even know if that would work because the BIOS chips had been replaced. Any ideas or info would be appreciated. I don't want to have to program IBM BIOS chips and buy an IBM HDD/Floppy controller card!
P.S.: The hard drive is a CMI 6426, type number 2, 20MB, if that helps.