creepingnet
Veteran Member
In the constant state of narrowing down my vintage boxes at the house, I"m now down to three.
The Tandy 1000A I have blew it's SCSI HDD about a week ago, probably too much 24/7...so I took it as an opportunity to solve 2 problems - 1...I have a Franken-XT that I never use much anymore with wonky networking, an XT-IDE card...so I figured, might as well take that down, and move the parts to the Tandy.
The process went a little like this.....
Installed the XT-IDE card into the Tandy at the default settings, but it could not find the drives like the XT could.....hookay, time to figureout what's going on here....
The first thing is I had to re-flash the card as the Tandy does not have on-board ROM BASIC. Then I changed to the thin configuration (used on Tandy due to the memory usage by the Enhanced CGA Controller), and left the Slave in just in case I go crazy and decide to throw another sub 1GB drive in there (Though I think the 540MB Seagate is more than enough space, heck, it's the same drive as my GEM 286 runs, and the 286 still has almost 300MB Left on it after installing everything that would run on a 286).
After that, I pulled the network card - a 3com Etherlink II TP, and THEN it booted right up with XT-IDE...and it was so much nicer than that ALR SCSI Card I had (Which took about 5 minutes to boot due to the super-slow laggy BIOS on the card), plus I could boot my booters straight off the A Drive my choice if I wanted.
The XT-IDE could not find the drives as the memory address was the same as the 3com Etherlink II TP network card....which then lead to another problem after changing the mem address of the NIC.....DRIVERS
Somewhere in the move, I lost my diskettes for the 3com drivers....but being the brave weirdo I am, I just decided to move the Intel EtherExpress 8/16 card into the Tandy, and take out the 3c503. Sure enough, it booted right up to the hard disk. Now it's network time.....
Next step was setting up networking. The drive had a functional install of Microsoft Network Client 3.0 on it, but I needed to fix the "internal error" that happens upon boot running the network boot config I setup in config.sys/autoexec.bat. This was fixed by changing to the basic redirector from the full redirector in MSNC30 setup, giving back some RAM.
Had to fix up the GEM a bit as well. Bad network cable, plus I forgot that I had removed the IPX/SPX and NetBEUI protocols from MSLANMAN on it too (probably the only 286 around that I know of that frequently uses TCP/IP over DHCP in MSLANMAN for networking) . I re-added those protocols and used the XT's ethernet cable to fix that problem of network connectivity....done!
All that's left to do now is set it up so I can SHARE the hard disk and start pushing software to it from my VM's/Linux install on the main box....but that will have to wait as my main PC is busted too...random lockups and crashes in Linux AND Windows.....seems to be related to the video card, but I'll deal with that later. Either way, it's nice to have everything back on the LAN again.
The Tandy 1000A I have blew it's SCSI HDD about a week ago, probably too much 24/7...so I took it as an opportunity to solve 2 problems - 1...I have a Franken-XT that I never use much anymore with wonky networking, an XT-IDE card...so I figured, might as well take that down, and move the parts to the Tandy.
The process went a little like this.....
Installed the XT-IDE card into the Tandy at the default settings, but it could not find the drives like the XT could.....hookay, time to figureout what's going on here....
The first thing is I had to re-flash the card as the Tandy does not have on-board ROM BASIC. Then I changed to the thin configuration (used on Tandy due to the memory usage by the Enhanced CGA Controller), and left the Slave in just in case I go crazy and decide to throw another sub 1GB drive in there (Though I think the 540MB Seagate is more than enough space, heck, it's the same drive as my GEM 286 runs, and the 286 still has almost 300MB Left on it after installing everything that would run on a 286).
After that, I pulled the network card - a 3com Etherlink II TP, and THEN it booted right up with XT-IDE...and it was so much nicer than that ALR SCSI Card I had (Which took about 5 minutes to boot due to the super-slow laggy BIOS on the card), plus I could boot my booters straight off the A Drive my choice if I wanted.
The XT-IDE could not find the drives as the memory address was the same as the 3com Etherlink II TP network card....which then lead to another problem after changing the mem address of the NIC.....DRIVERS
Somewhere in the move, I lost my diskettes for the 3com drivers....but being the brave weirdo I am, I just decided to move the Intel EtherExpress 8/16 card into the Tandy, and take out the 3c503. Sure enough, it booted right up to the hard disk. Now it's network time.....
Next step was setting up networking. The drive had a functional install of Microsoft Network Client 3.0 on it, but I needed to fix the "internal error" that happens upon boot running the network boot config I setup in config.sys/autoexec.bat. This was fixed by changing to the basic redirector from the full redirector in MSNC30 setup, giving back some RAM.
Had to fix up the GEM a bit as well. Bad network cable, plus I forgot that I had removed the IPX/SPX and NetBEUI protocols from MSLANMAN on it too (probably the only 286 around that I know of that frequently uses TCP/IP over DHCP in MSLANMAN for networking) . I re-added those protocols and used the XT's ethernet cable to fix that problem of network connectivity....done!
All that's left to do now is set it up so I can SHARE the hard disk and start pushing software to it from my VM's/Linux install on the main box....but that will have to wait as my main PC is busted too...random lockups and crashes in Linux AND Windows.....seems to be related to the video card, but I'll deal with that later. Either way, it's nice to have everything back on the LAN again.