PS/2 Model 25-286 w/ Reply PowerBoard "Invalid Configuration"

[ButINeededThatName]

So I recently pulled this system out to work on it again after letting it sit to focus on some other projects (needed a new hard drive, drive cable and floppy drive) and I am no longer able to access it's BIOS/setup program. Upon powering it on it will do its memory test then come up with "Invalid Configuration". Apparently this is due to the system battery dying and what I need to do is run the setup utility (ref367).

Well, I made the appropriate diskette and it won't seem to boot from floppy. I've written a couple of different disks and tried four different drives (an Alps, two Mitsubishi's and a known working Sony 2.88 drive) with no luck so far. Am I missing something here? The information on these isn't great, but I'd assume you treat it like a normal PS/2 that's lost it's configuration and just boot from the appropriate refdisk and restore everything.

 

[NeXT]

Reference diskettes are EXTREMELY picky about what writes them out and "touches" them.
Most people have found the best luck for creating a working disk is in pure DOS. Windows without telling you will write its own fluff to the disk if you peek at its contents and that's enough on its own for it to reject the diskette.

 

[Jove]

A model 25-286 with a reset bios will only boot from a 720k drive. a 1.44M drive with a 720K disk won't work .... I went circles and circles trying to get around this.

An alternative fix is to slap an xt-ide card in place with a drive attached, CF or otherwise, with the executables from the reference disk so you can set the bios settings.

The XT-IDE CF-lite was a good fix, and I also managed to get myself out of the same situation with a gotek and a couple of configuration changes. If you search for old threads that I started you will find my adventures with the Model 25.

 

[ButINeededThatName]

Reference diskettes are EXTREMELY picky about what writes them out and "touches" them.
Most people have found the best luck for creating a working disk is in pure DOS. Windows without telling you will write its own fluff to the disk if you peek at its contents and that's enough on its own for it to reject the diskette.

​​​​​​Thanks for the tip. I've mainly been using DOSBox to decompress the images, then a USB floppy and WinWrite to write them to a disk. So far I haven't had any issues with this method, but I could try using one of my other machines to write the disk.

A model 25-286 with a reset bios will only boot from a 720k drive. a 1.44M drive with a 720K disk won't work .... I went circles and circles trying to get around this.

I read something about this, however I assumed it no longer applied since the original planar was replaced with a Reply PowerBoard.

 

[ButINeededThatName]

Alright, I wrote the image using DSKIMAGE in DOS and still no luck. So either all of the drives I've tried with the 25 are dead or I do in fact need a 720k drive (which I don't have) to restore this system.

I suppose this is what I get for putting this project off for so long :lol:

 

[whaka]

does the reply board need a floppy drive with media sense ?
in that case, it can identify if 720 or 1,44 is in. i know some models are picky on that and can give a 604 error if no media sense.
the model 35 is in that case, but execept the error code, everything work normally.

 

[ButINeededThatName]

Alright, so nearly a month later and I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall with this system. I've tried just about everything I can think of from using different, known working diskette drives, swapping jumpers (FDC mode select and CMOS clear) and different disks to try and get it to load something. Despite all of that, I still can't get past this screen and into the setup utility.



It'll try and boot off of the hard disk, then the diskette drive LED will come on for a few seconds and go out. Striking F1 (or anything else) won't get the drive to show any sign of activity again until you restart the system again.
I've seen some suggestions regarding needing a 720k drive or a media-sense drive, however the image for the Reply setup disk is for 1.44mb format disks, so a 720k drive wouldn't make sense and one would think a 1.44mb drive would work.

​​​​​​​I've also tried to find the manual this board came with to see if I could gleam any insight from it, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like a copy, either physical or digital exists anywhere.

 

[Jove]

Drastic measure, this is how I eventually got one of my model 25 machines to boot. Drastic if you dont have one handy anyway. xt-ide of some kind, I used an xt-cf-lite and a CF card. managed to get it to boot enough to run the setup program. Does the Reply Powerboard have an onboard IDE controller rather than the weird not-quite-XTA controlls on the original boards?

 

[ButINeededThatName]

Drastic measure, this is how I eventually got one of my model 25 machines to boot. Drastic if you dont have one handy anyway. xt-ide of some kind, I used an xt-cf-lite and a CF card. managed to get it to boot enough to run the setup program. Does the Reply Powerboard have an onboard IDE controller rather than the weird not-quite-XTA controlls on the original boards?

I do have an XT-IDE adapter and a bootable CF card I tried to use, with no luck. It also does have on-board IDE, but I don't have an IDE to CF adapter on-hand.