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Just purchased the computer I used in elementary - having trouble though

SomeGuy said:
When you change to a different drive type you will need to change the jumpers on the FDC card:
http://th99.classic-computing.de/src/i/C-D/50286.htm
Click to expand...

Ha, of course! Jumpers! It's been a long time... 11 year old me would have known this. :D

I need to defer to some brighter minds here as I am not quite sure what settings should be in place. Here is how they currently are:
tn_20160809_111150.jpg

According to this picture here and these labels this is how I have the drives plugged up:
fddcable.jpg

Drive A: 5.25" Mitsumi 1.2M 45103
Drive B: 3.5" NEC FD1231M from 2007

The JP3 A and B make sense as I think both should be open. But JP3 C and D jumpers have me confused.

Also not sure if any of the others should be changed?

I am completely open to having just the 3.5" plugged in even though I do have some 5.25" disks I'd like to access eventually.
 
Oh, balls, that table in the TH99 link is laid out wrong.

Usually the first two jumpers or switches are for drive A and the next two are for drive B:.

So in that table, they probably meant to put "drive a" over JP3/A and JP3/B, and "drive b" over JP3/C and JP3/D.

Well, with a 1.4mb and 1.2mb all but one of the jumpers should be open, so if that doesn't work you only have three other possibilities in case that order is not correct.

The settings in the photo would indicate a 1.2mb as A: and 360k as B:.
 
SomeGuy said:
Oh, balls, that table in the TH99 link is laid out wrong.

Usually the first two jumpers or switches are for drive A and the next two are for drive B:.

So in that table, they probably meant to put "drive a" over JP3/A and JP3/B, and "drive b" over JP3/C and JP3/D.

Well, with a 1.4mb and 1.2mb all but one of the jumpers should be open, so if that doesn't work you only have three other possibilities in case that order is not correct.

The settings in the photo would indicate a 1.2mb as A: and 360k as B:.
Click to expand...

I think you are correct, that would match the two types of drives currently in the system. I have changed the jumpers and attempted to boot the computer but I am just not having luck with this thing... I now get this error when it boots:
tn_20160809_134107.jpg

The hard drive makes what I would call a groaning noise when I try c:\command.com. I would not be shocked at all to learn the drive is failing.

I'm currently looking to make a DOS 6.2 boot disk.
 
Success!

Success!

Ladies and gentlemen this right here makes this purchase worth every single penny I spent!

tn_20160809_142458.jpgtn_20160809_142511.jpgtn_20160809_142555.jpg

I know that with help from people here I can work through the other issues. But this, this was my main goal.

I am unbelievably happy right now. :D
 
These old drives don't park their head automatically, so if you move the machine without manually parking the heads with some diagnostics disk, you risk causing a disk crash! If that's the case, you're best off with preforming a low-level format of the drive. A low-level format will enable you to mark any bad sectors, and those will not be used in the future.
 
Good to hear that much is working now.

What I would do is run Check-it http://minuszerodegrees.net/software/software.htm and thoroughly test out the RAM and other components.

As for the hard drive, it very well might be going, but make sure the rest of the machine is working reliably first. I would back everything up, perform a fresh low-level format, FDISK, DOS format, and follow that up with a thorough test using Spinrite.
 
I will certainly run Check-it when I get back from out of town later this week. Thank you for the suggestion.

Since there isn't anything on the drive except a fresh install of Dos I will try a low level format on it. I'll report back with the results.

Thanks again for everyone's help. This has been a really fun nostalgic experience.
 
EDIT- scratch this - my boot disk had somehow become corrupted. i had to reformat it with winimage. all is good. going to try to format the hard drive now.

Question about booting to a floppy.

With the hard drive plugged in even if I have a boot disk in the floppy drive the computer still tries to boot to the hard drive. I found this info here on switches but even with switch 1 off it still tries to boot from the hard drive.

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~preid/pcxtsw.htm

Any suggestions?
 
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dreniarb said:
With the hard drive plugged in even if I have a boot disk in the floppy drive the computer still tries to boot to the hard drive. I found this info here on switches but even with switch 1 off it still tries to boot from the hard drive.
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~preid/pcxtsw.htm
Click to expand...
I think you must be interpreting, "off = Boot from floppy" as, "off = boot ONLY from floppy". That is an incorrect interpretation. The web page is poorly worded and wrong in places. A better description of the switch settings is at [here].

With the switch off, the power-on self test (POST) knows that there are one or floppy drives present in the 5150, and from that information, the POST knows to add the first floppy drive to the list of things to attempt a boot from.

dreniarb said:
Any suggestions?
Click to expand...
I have seen your subsequent thread in which you got the hard drive going, so I assume that you are no longer seeking suggestions.
 
modem7 said:
I have seen your subsequent thread in which you got the hard drive going, so I assume that you are no longer seeking suggestions.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions on a fix.

Yes, this particular problem has been solved. :)

I do not see an option to edit the original title of the thread so I can mark it as solved. If I'm overlooking it I'd love to change it so others know.
 
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