tempest
Veteran Member
I'm having some issues with my IBM 5150 and I'm not sure where the issue might be. It's a late version with the final BIOS, 256K on the motherboard, it has a half height 5.25" and 3.5" drive in it (set to 720k), and it has a math co-processor chip. For cards I have an XT-IDE with an SD card adapter board, a gameport cart, a floppy controller card (IBM I think), a ATI EGA Wonder card (for use with my 5151), and a weird Six Pack clone by Multitech which has full memory to bring the system up to 640K (Picture below), but I'm not using the extra gameport or serial port add ons with it. The original 63W power supply that came with it originally worked, but it was making a whistling noise until it warmed up so I figured it was dying and replaced it with a beefier 150W power supply by Power Tronic. Everything seemed to be ok so I put it away for a year or two, but when I pulled it out of storage this weekend I started having issues.
I went to go and format the SD card using FDISK from DOS 5, which seemed to be working fine, when suddenly the monitor seemed to lose power. I turned everything off and tried again but this time when the computer had to reboot after making the partition the disk drive light stayed on when trying to boot the DOS disk and never actually completed the reboot (this would have been a warm boot). I decided to plug the monitor into its own power source (not into the onboard power supply) and tried again. I got a little further with FDISK when it crashed again but this time the monitor didn't lose power since it was on its own power source and I could see the screen was frozen while in the middle of trying to display something.
At this point I suspected that one of the cards might be bad or I might have bad memory somewhere. I yanked out all the boards except the video and disk drive board and booted into the BASIC. That ran fine for a good hour and never crashed so I booted a text adventure called Zyll (my options for programs are limited with 256K) and let that run for an hour. No problems there. I put in all the cards except the memory card and repeated the tests. Everything seemed ok with no crashing. My next step is try and put the memory card back in but I'm not sure what the dip switch settings should be since I can't find any info on the card. I'm hoping something is just misconfigured on it and maybe that's what's causing the problem. The only other thing I can think of is that the power supply is no good, but if that were the case you'd think it wouldn't boot at all. Even with the memory card in sometimes I can get it to boot an old HDD I have and everything seems to work ok, so the problem is a bit intermittent.
Any ideas on what might be wrong?
I went to go and format the SD card using FDISK from DOS 5, which seemed to be working fine, when suddenly the monitor seemed to lose power. I turned everything off and tried again but this time when the computer had to reboot after making the partition the disk drive light stayed on when trying to boot the DOS disk and never actually completed the reboot (this would have been a warm boot). I decided to plug the monitor into its own power source (not into the onboard power supply) and tried again. I got a little further with FDISK when it crashed again but this time the monitor didn't lose power since it was on its own power source and I could see the screen was frozen while in the middle of trying to display something.
At this point I suspected that one of the cards might be bad or I might have bad memory somewhere. I yanked out all the boards except the video and disk drive board and booted into the BASIC. That ran fine for a good hour and never crashed so I booted a text adventure called Zyll (my options for programs are limited with 256K) and let that run for an hour. No problems there. I put in all the cards except the memory card and repeated the tests. Everything seemed ok with no crashing. My next step is try and put the memory card back in but I'm not sure what the dip switch settings should be since I can't find any info on the card. I'm hoping something is just misconfigured on it and maybe that's what's causing the problem. The only other thing I can think of is that the power supply is no good, but if that were the case you'd think it wouldn't boot at all. Even with the memory card in sometimes I can get it to boot an old HDD I have and everything seems to work ok, so the problem is a bit intermittent.
Any ideas on what might be wrong?