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My new PS/2 Model 30-286

T

TandyMan100

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Jan 7, 2009
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At my computer
Repost from my other thread, thought this would be more relevant here:
Well, I pulled apart the PS/2 to take a look inside, and found a remarkably clean computer. Hardly any dust to be found. After laughing at the power switch for a while, I removed the modem and put in an Intel Etherexpress 16. However, I noticed this enormous full-length expansion card in the top ISA slot. It had a big plastic cover towards the front which read "Hardcard II 80". Interesting. I'll google that later. I got the etherexpress put in, took some pictures (you'll be able to find a full write-up on retro-box.net when I get my server turned back on), and wrapped it all up. Upon researching the hardcard, it turns out the Hardcard II 80 was an 80mb ISA hard drive expansion for the PS/2 and compatibles. Interesting. I booted up and typed in "D:" the results of which were seen immediately. I then did a DIR, and was greeted with what looked like a standard win3.1 installation with Word and some fonts. I cd'd to the windows directory and ran win, and saw that I was correct. I have no clue how the previous user used this thing with Win3.1, as it was unusably slow for me. Finding nothing of interest on the 80mb hard drive, I formatted it. Pretty interesting stuff. I've got PC-DOS 7 running, and now I just need to replace the RTC chip (those are socketed, right? I can just pull them out?)
Click to expand...

Questions? Comments? Ideas on stuff I could do? Anyone have a clue how to remove the write-protection that seems to be enabled on the HardCard? I can't format or write any changes to it, so I'm assuming that's the issue.

Also, what would you guys appraise this system at? Hardcard, monitor, pc, and all?
 
The RTC is Soldered! And trying to get a replacement could be a Pain. As for formatting I think the Plus Hardcards needed a hardware driver loaded through config.sys. Google for ATDOSXL.SYS I think thats the one you need.
 
Same here. It's in a socket. Mine will boot even though the RTC battery is dead.

Dallas batteries arent that hard to get. And even if they are soldered, just perform the hack on the battery.
 
TandyMan100: I have no clue how the previous user used this thing with Win3.1, as it was unusably slow for me.
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My theory is that people tend to upgrade computers shortly before they discard them. The upgrade, being more resource hungry, runs slowly and induces the owner to look for new hardware. I base this theory on the number of discarded computers I've seen with a sticker for the previous version of the OS.
 
Chromedome45 said:
The RTC is Soldered! And trying to get a replacement could be a Pain. As for formatting I think the Plus Hardcards needed a hardware driver loaded through config.sys. Google for ATDOSXL.SYS I think thats the one you need.
Click to expand...

The hardcard is accessible with no drivers whatsoever under PC-DOS. Loads right up, I can read from it just fine as my D:\ drive, but no matter what I do, I can't write to the little bugger.

DOS lives on!! said:
Same here. It's in a socket. Mine will boot even though the RTC battery is dead.

Dallas batteries arent that hard to get. And even if they are soldered, just perform the hack on the battery.
Click to expand...

I *think* mine is socketed. There's an extra layer of plastic underneath the big black box of the RTC itself, so I think it's a socket. I sure as heck can't get it out with my bare hands, though. Boots just fine, I just have to push F1 every time.

Ole Juul said:
My theory is that people tend to upgrade computers shortly before they discard them. The upgrade, being more resource hungry, runs slowly and induces the owner to look for new hardware. I base this theory on the number of discarded computers I've seen with a sticker for the previous version of the OS.
Click to expand...

Yeah, from what I know this computer previously belonged to a church, so that's pretty likely. The fact it has a write-protected hardcard in it also leads me to believe that it was for public use, or use by people with no clue what they were doing (Word, Windows, drivers and such are all on the D:\ drive, it looks like. The C:\ drive just holds documents and a base DOS installation).
 
Chromedome45 said:
As for formatting I think the Plus Hardcards needed a hardware driver loaded through config.sys. Google for ATDOSXL.SYS I think thats the one you need.
Click to expand...

Frank is right on this.

TandyMan100 said:
The hardcard is accessible with no drivers whatsoever under PC-DOS. Loads right up, I can read from it just fine as my D:\ drive, but no matter what I do, I can't write to the little bugger.
Click to expand...

Some of the Plus Development HardCards need the driver that Frank mentioned. They are read only without the driver loaded. I have 2 XL 105's and I couldn't write to them until I loaded the device driver. At first I thought the drives were dead. The previous owner had formatted the drives so there wasn't any data and I couldn't write to them.
 
TandyMan100 said:
The hardcard is accessible with no drivers whatsoever under PC-DOS. Loads right up, I can read from it just fine as my D:\ drive, but no matter what I do, I can't write to the little bugger.
Click to expand...

Consider yourself lucky; they had a very high failure rate. The XL models in particular used EEPROMS that fade after 5-10 years (the drive is fine, but the EEPROM is empty). I would read the data off of it quickly.

I have the HardCard 40 diskette but all it comes with is a partitioning utility (that splits the 40MB drive into two 20MB partitions) and the ATDOS.SYS driver which, as noted above, doesn't seem necessary to use the drive.

(edit: I stand corrected, the driver is required to do writing. You have to boot from a diskette with the driver loaded, then you copy the driver to the hard drive, then you're set.)
 
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