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New purchase was not what I expected it to be. Very surprised Packard Bell Legend I

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fallemarg

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2010
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133
Location
Olathe, Kansas
I recently won an auction for what looked like a Packard Bell legend 600X but I was extremely surprised when I received the machine to find a Legend I, which is apparently older. I don't know much about the machine and I am hoping that some of the questions I have can be answered here by the community as the help here so far has been fantastic. I have some pictures posted below so every can take a look if they like. The insides of the machine look brand new. There isn't a spot of dust at all in the entire thing. The battery is dead of course, but it's external so easily removed and replaced I feel. The Packard Bell Labeled 3.5" drive seeks upon boot but when I try to get it to read a disk it indicates a failure. Not sure what's wrong, but I would like to fix it if anyone has any suggestions. The 5.25" drive works perfectly and I think it says Mitsumi on it. The video card is an Oak Technologies OVD-16C or something (I think that is what it says on the card) which appears to be a 256KB VGA card. It standard VGA and a CGA video connector (what is it called, HD15 and DB9? Or something?) and the picture is very nice and clean. There is a modem in the machine that has chip that says PB and a number on it, but I don't know anything else about it. And the hard drive included is a Winchester drive 41MB (type 42 in the BIOS). Amazingly, the drive works perfectly I ran scandisk on it with my DOS 6.22 disk on it and no bad sectors were found at all. I was under the impression one of the reasons Winchester drives were phased out was because they had a horrible failure percentage. It is a 286-12MHz model.

Okay so first question - The BIOS continuously reports an incorrect memory size. The machine has 640K Base and 384K extended which is all the motherboard will allow for. The BIOS regularly indicates up to 16384K of extended, which doesn't exist. There are no RAM sockets, be it dimm, simm, dip, dil, or zip on the board at all. Is this because the CMOS battery is dead? Second question, what would cause the 3.5" drive to seek fine upon boot, but fail at reading disks? I have a ton of floppy drives around so it isn't too much of an issue, but I was hoping to use the one that came with it. Third, there are two ISA 16-Bit looking slots on the motherboard, one of which the card riser plugs into, but the other is empty. What is that for? I was an Commodore user until we got a 486 so I don't have any experience with the older architecture, so any assistance would be fantastic I just don't know a lot about the older IBM machines. But I know a little about the Amiga computers and the C-64/128's. Enough to cause damage, that is :p

Here are the pictures, if anyone can give me any information in regards to the questions I have, please let me know? Thank you so much for the help.

Kind Regards,

Nathan

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Your system may be a Sears special which means the standard PB machine counterpart will be recorded under a different name.

3.5" drive: most likely explanation is that the heads are dirty or damaged. Try cleaning the drive. Still fails, open it up and make sure the heads are intact.

The second ISA looking slot may in fact just be a second ISA slot. Packard Bell had lots of similar systems with different riser cards depending on which tower case was used or no riser card if placed in a pizza box. Find a manual if you can. I would expect it to have been used for memory cards because the riser may not accept full length cards.

The video card is probably a EGA/VGA combo card. Great card to keep around. I can't find anything about that specific card model. Maybe a picture could allow identification of the model number for units not shipped to PB. PB requested that many of their components be given different model numbers to make comparison shopping harder.

Replace CMOS battery. Can't determine much until that is working.

The MFM hard drive is about 25-30 years old. It was designed to run 5. MFM got replaced because it was difficult to increase capacity beyond 100 MB while IDE became cheap and big.

If you can get closer images of the whole motherboard, more information may be gleaned.

If you have lots of time, look through http://pbclub.pwcsite.com/wiki/index.php?title=Packard_Bell_Models to see if any model seems close to what you have.
Packard Bell's current owners have taken down the images that showed lots of old motherboards which http://www.oocities.org/sjg/mother2.html used to link to. Check the parent page as well but press escape quick to prevent a redirect.

Edit: Oocities link changed to one that does not have a web ring redirect
 
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The chip on the Oak Technologies video card is an OTI037C, so very low end if I understand correctly. Good enough for the 286 I think. The extra ISA slot looks intentional, but I don't know what for. There isn't enough space for a full length card that direction. I think that the riser is capable of taking a full length card, but I could be very mistaken. I can take more pictures if you like. I will pull all of the expansion cards out and take pictures of each so they can be seen.
 
Nice tidy system. Neat the the hdd is in top shape as well. The Oak card will be fine for a lot of that era software. I had one in my original 286/16. Being an AT class system it is easy enough to replace if/when needed cheaply.

A few possibilities for that extra slot on the mobo are ram expansion, processor (386sx) upgrade slot or the mobo was used by other OEMs with a different layout case design.

In 1991 PB Legend 100 and 200 series 286s shipped with the menu/tutorial software pictured below along with MS Dos 4.01 and Lotus Works.
 

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The 3.5" floppy is a really a Panasonic JU-257; the "M" insignia is for Matsushita, the parent of the "Panasonic" brand.

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I was pretty sure the 3.5" floppy was a rebadged Panasonic drive. I have a panasonic drive here that is labelled the same with the JU-2XX information. Shockingly, it's dead too. Doesn't even seek on boot.
 
I took some more pictures this morning. Including the dead battery. It's a 3.6v Lithium, so I'm thinking I can utilize a 3xAAA battery holder for it. The front is yellowed of course, but overall it looks to be in pretty good shape. I think the modem is a 2400 Baud modem. I put in the only 8-bit sound card I have which is a Sound Blaster Pro. I would like to get an Adlib card for it, but I haven't been able to find one, or get a complete kit. The riser definitely can support full length cards. There are braces to hold cards in place. I'm guessing the extra ISA slot can be a spot for the Winchester card. I think the 1MB of RAM the machine has is fine for running the programs I want on it. I would like to get an IDE card for it.

IMG_20150823_102542175.jpgIMG_20150823_102634252.jpgIMG_20150823_102643060.jpgIMG_20150823_103423336.jpgIMG_20150823_103459208.jpgView attachment 26030View attachment 26031View attachment 26032
 
I don't mind not having an Adlib branded card. But an FM OPL2 card would be something like what was available when the machine was new. That Sergey Adlib kit would be fun to build, but I haven't really gotten down to brass tacks and located all of the parts.
 
There's a 5 attachment limit per post.

Nice thing about that Oak card is you can use it in XT class systems if you need to, good for trouble shooting. Modems are pretty useless though and a nic could be useful to play with Dos networking if you're that way inclined.

I picked up an Amstrad branded Adlib clone card from a crappy Amstrad 286 I scrapped. It was the only useful bit of hardware on that particular system. I have a soft spot for 286s as a 286/16 was my first x86 system.
 
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So in regards to getting a remake board from Sergey, how would one go about doing so? His website says you can build one or order one from him, but I don't see where I can place an order.
 
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