nige the hippy
Veteran Member
Well last week my mate picked up a little compaq 386slt from the roadside, and you know how it is with roadkill computers, you've just got to get them going. well tonight I decided that as next door are having a party (and the wall is glowing faintly blue trying to dissipate the energy going into it!) I would have a go.
It was looking a little worse for wear, so I decided to start by stripping it down.
once you've got the case off, there's an almost infinite number of torx screws to actually take the metalwork apart.
Removed the PSU and found it had a capacitor missing??? so i put a silly one in, belled out the power connector pins, and replaced it with a standard DC power socket. then powered up a minimal system & it kind-of worked. Checked the voltage across the cap, and replaced it with an appropriate one that would fit. filed out the original power inlet to take the DC socket, and glued & bolted the psu back together. so far so good...
CMOS & real time clock come up with errors, so a bit more stripping (discovered the 387 co-pro!!!), and I find it has one of those obsolete all-in-one Dallas real time clock chips with the battery (that lasted about 2 minutes with a following wind) built in. AAARRRGGGH... until i discovered this site....
http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm
So I set to with my Dremel & a dentists drill-type burr, and gouged two holes out of the chip, and installed an external battery. looked like a good job.
Next... install a new HD, old one had been butchered out.
Well I don't know what hard drives compaq used, but they weren't quite a normal 3.5" form factor. much snipping and a custom cable or two. and I put one of my apparently-breeding 1.2G fujitsu drives in.
Put it all approximately back together again, and lo and behold - it doesn't work. It won't read the set up disk.
so either I didn't do the battery thing right, or there is genuinely a fault with the FDC controller or drive. The drive is one of those strange 26 way header connected types. i have one in an apricot machine that is going to be stripped for cannibalisation, but I'm trying to reduce the bodycount in here!
Frustration, and it's such a little cutie {:-{> (kind of french smilie!)
pictures to follow when I can find the upload cable!
Anyway the INPUT-TO-THE-GROUP aspect of this post is the link to the Dallas hack, cos if it works, it's a godsend.
It was looking a little worse for wear, so I decided to start by stripping it down.
once you've got the case off, there's an almost infinite number of torx screws to actually take the metalwork apart.
Removed the PSU and found it had a capacitor missing??? so i put a silly one in, belled out the power connector pins, and replaced it with a standard DC power socket. then powered up a minimal system & it kind-of worked. Checked the voltage across the cap, and replaced it with an appropriate one that would fit. filed out the original power inlet to take the DC socket, and glued & bolted the psu back together. so far so good...
CMOS & real time clock come up with errors, so a bit more stripping (discovered the 387 co-pro!!!), and I find it has one of those obsolete all-in-one Dallas real time clock chips with the battery (that lasted about 2 minutes with a following wind) built in. AAARRRGGGH... until i discovered this site....
http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm
So I set to with my Dremel & a dentists drill-type burr, and gouged two holes out of the chip, and installed an external battery. looked like a good job.
Next... install a new HD, old one had been butchered out.
Well I don't know what hard drives compaq used, but they weren't quite a normal 3.5" form factor. much snipping and a custom cable or two. and I put one of my apparently-breeding 1.2G fujitsu drives in.
Put it all approximately back together again, and lo and behold - it doesn't work. It won't read the set up disk.
so either I didn't do the battery thing right, or there is genuinely a fault with the FDC controller or drive. The drive is one of those strange 26 way header connected types. i have one in an apricot machine that is going to be stripped for cannibalisation, but I'm trying to reduce the bodycount in here!
Frustration, and it's such a little cutie {:-{> (kind of french smilie!)
pictures to follow when I can find the upload cable!
Anyway the INPUT-TO-THE-GROUP aspect of this post is the link to the Dallas hack, cos if it works, it's a godsend.
