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Magnavox HeadStart 386sx

PhilipA

PhilipA

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2013
Messages
476
Location
Larose, LA, USA
Recently picked this beast up.

Cleaned out the dirt (large volume) and powered it up after cleaning up all the contacts.

20170209_005706.jpg


Hard drive checks out good, surprisingly. 85Mb Seagate.

I've ordered a new cable for the CDROM, which should be here Friday.
Had a bit of fun playing Wolfenstein 3D, sound blaster in the back (not sure if that was standard fit).

Phil
 
Looks a lot like the Vectra QS/20 I'm working on now. I definitely dont need to do any lifting at the gym the days I lug that thing around, thats for sure.
 
It's surprisingly lightweight. Also, 90% tool-less case, which is remarkable for 1993.

Fairly well thought out and assembled. Fit and finish is pretty good- been tidying up the configuration to free up some memory. Had a rummage and Google turned up a post from 13 years ago that said ctrl-alt-insert at the end of the RAM test to get into the BIOS. Surprisingly, the BIOS has a lot of configurable options, though the limitation on hard drive types is even worse than on my Compaq 386. The largest drive int he list is 200-ish Mb.

Stuck a music CD into the drive, it spun up and started to play flawlessly, so hopefully once the serial cable comes in I can pull some data off it and see how it works. If so, that'll be a good way to rapidly (hah) move data from more modern machines until I can find the Ethernet cards I have tucked away somewhere.

--Phil
 
Having a go at the hard drive. I'm trying to recall, and for the life of me I canot- how I went ahead and did a low level format on a modern drive and altered the C/H/S parameters of the drive.

The BIOS on this allows you to set Type 31 (custom) with up to 1024 cylinders, 255 heads and a bunch of sectors/track

I should be able to set 1024/16/63 for 504Mb, but I need to low-level the drive in order to be able to do that... does the XTIDE have that functionality built into its BIOS?


*edit - I'm thinking I did it with GPartEd on another computer last time.

--Phil
 
Last edited:
PhilipA said:
Having a go at the hard drive. I'm trying to recall, and for the life of me I canot- how I went ahead and did a low level format on a modern drive and altered the C/H/S parameters of the drive.

The BIOS on this allows you to set Type 31 (custom) with up to 1024 cylinders, 255 heads and a bunch of sectors/track

I should be able to set 1024/16/63 for 504Mb, but I need to low-level the drive in order to be able to do that... does the XTIDE have that functionality built into its BIOS?


*edit - I'm thinking I did it with GPartEd on another computer last time.

--Phil
Click to expand...
I doubt that you ever did a LLF on a 'modern drive'. :)
 
That's true, didn't LLF it, I just rewrote the information for the partitions.. some work, some don't like the characteristics being not what they actually are.


--Phil
 
Alright, a non-optimal 3600RPM IBM IDE drive with 2Gb cap set and partitioned down to the maximum the BIOS can natively handle (limited by 16 heads on the device), 540Mb.

Boots up, but not as fast as it can be. Significantly better with a 7200RPM drive (tested this in the past and the difference is striking), as that generally will outperform the controller...

Needs a full reinstall but eh, it's all good. Boots, works for now. CD cable due to be delivered this evening, shall collect that from mother in law's house tomorrow.


--Phil
 
Serial cable arrived today. Hooked it up, the driver days it detected a device.. put in a cdrom and after a bit of thought the thing output me a directory listing!

Next up, finding software for the cdrom...

Phil
 
Haven't got that far yet, think I'll pull off 3.1 and put 3.11 on it, with the networking set up.

Case of ad-hoc software tbh. Whatever strikes my fancy at the time :)

Phil
 
I've had a look in my usual places but haven't turned up much. Does anyone happen to know of a motherboard diagram or user manual for this system? I can find the 286 version on Stason but not the 386.


--Phil
 
Been working on this over the last few days, got a few utilities on it now, some of the software that I used to have back in the day. Upgraded to MSDOS 6.22, stuck WFW3.11 on it and am next up going to try remember how to get TCP/IP working in 3.11 with Winsock. Tried my old Cirrus Logic video card in it, the drivers are not great and it only provides a marginal increase in performance so I'm going to stick with the onboard VGA for now.
It's been a while since I played with 3.11, it's quite a bit different from what I've become used to, heh.

--Phil
 
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