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New Toy

Makes sense.

Hooked up the 286 to my compaq 486 last night. Tried transferring interlink.exe over to it using the rcopy switch but no go. Fired up the New Deal Office terminal to get a visual perspective of what was going on. Having the terminal open and of to one side and the recieving directory window on the other is damn handy. It was obvious I could transfer files from the 286 but not the other way, the mouse worked fine on the serial port. To cut a long story short, in the end I just removed the current serial card, placing a generic multi i/o card it's 8 bit slot. Then set the 286 up to receive interlink.exe and instant success. Ran intersvr on the 286 and transferred the nic packet driver along with the mTCP suite.
 
Hooked the 4 gig Bigfoot with overlay software to it this evening with MS Dos 6.22 installed on it. The full on board 1 meg is recognised as 640 and the rest reserved. Had to comment out the 386 and cdrom related stuff obviously. Is showing 561k conv. free with smartdrv and mouse driver loaded so a bit still a of tweaking to do.

Fdd power adapters haven't turned yet. What I'll do is swap out the current IDE controller and the serial card for a single multi i/o card. That'll free up another slot for goodies.
 
Got sick of waiting for the power adapters so just went down to the local Jacar store and got some when I got the milk/bread. Only needed one as it has two smaller connectors. It's handy to have a spare. Found the 5.25" to 3.5" adapter so will assemble everything later in the day. Also revealed two 5.25" 1.2 meg fdd I'd totally forgotten about. The joys of storage/hoarding-you discover something different every time you explore the boxes.
 
Yip only this afternnoon found out I had a power adapter in one of my SS7 machines so spent $4 for nothing this morning ;).

Tried getting everything on a few spare multi i/o cards I have but the beasty wasn't booting realibly all the time. Ended up going back to the fdd/hdd controller in that was in the machine. Disabled unused devices in the multi o/i card I'd used earlier for serial port transfer to prevent conflicts. There's an intermtent issue on the serial side of things though. Almost as if irqs 3 and 4 go west. Tried swapping slots removing cards to see if that helps.

It's working ok now but no promises all is good on the next reboot/restart though. Ahh the joys of old kit. On the bright side there's a drive bay under the current 40meg hdd so I can have a cdrom/fdd/tape drive/etc in the centre bay.
 
Well wadduya know. Had another shot at the 8-bit card and removed two jumpers that set the addresses and all seems to be spot on now. Tried 3 different rodents and all where being correctly reported by ctmouse, ms mouse.com and the genius driver. Down side is only one serial port, with older UART, for the time being. I can live with that now the nic is up and running.
 
So true. And I have a nice yellow Nortons one that'll do just nicely.

Reconnected the 40meg drive, deleted all the previous owners related files and installed Geoworks 2.0. it'll make more efficient use of the extra ram compared to Windows 3.x on a 286.
 
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Had a bit of a break as the serial port issue popped up again. I think it may be heat/voltage/component related or a combination as it crops up around 15 minutes after the machine is switched on. For no good reason other than seeing if it made any difference I've hooked up another psu. It's now booting without having to press the reset switch. This in itself is an indication the original psu isn't performing correctly.

Restarted it a number of times and it seems ok, but I'm not holding my breath at the moment. I'll give it a real soak test on the weekend.

Current config as far as cards go is a multi i/o card, nic, sound card, svga card, and 33k modem.
 
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I always pull modems, basically a wasted slot these days :/

Good luck with PSU. I prefer it when they outright go pop - easier to find the fault!
 
Got around to cleaning the mobo, case and p/s today. Had a good look under a magnifying glass at the mobo and couldn't see anything amiss externally. Bit of a rattle coming from the p/s so opened it up and removed a nut. Obviously it wasn't needed ;). Assembled the thing with just the video card and i/o card. The intermitent serial port issue has me stumped. Machine seems to be starting better one nut less though. Other than that very else seems to work fine.

The "new" 486 hasn't turned up yet either which is a bit of a worry.
 
My machine (sold at the same time, same seller) arrived two working days after payment. I paid with PayNow and am local though. If it's late, might need to call the courier and make sure it's not sitting there waiting for pickup. I've had a couple of packages before that went to the depot, but the courier forgot to leave a card :/
 
I've emailed asking if there is a tracking number. If this 286 doesn't get sorted I'll slap the 486DX4/100 in it's place. You've always got to have a backup plan.
 
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