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Olivetti 286 hard disk options?

J

justanotherhacker

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Mar 22, 2013
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London, UK
Hi all

I'd really like to seek your advice about what I can do about a failing hard disk.

I have an Olivetti pcs-286 that's been in my family a long time. Until recently it hadn't been turned on for about 10 years. A little while ago I checked it out, found the PSU was dead. Motherboard-to-PSU cable is not a standard I have ever seen or can find documented, but I worked it out and grafted in a standard AT PSU (outside the case, the Oli is pretty compact). That allowed me to boot it up and recover a lot of old family documents. Some of the advice in posts on this forum was really helpful (starting with "don't just plug it in and turn it on, check the PSU"!), so I'd like to thank this community for that :)

So far so good... but unfortunately the hard disk is clearly on the verge of death. There is a lot of data corruption, and it boots only about 1 time in 3 at best. None of the programs work, they're all too far gone. DOS format /s didn't work so I couldn't make a bootable floppy... until I found another copy of the DOS data which had an uncorrupted format.com, so at least now I can boot the thing from disk. chkdsk /f has hardly helped... things seem to be deteriorating as I use the thing.

However, it kind of gave me the bug for messing around in DOS again! Also, I want to try brushing up my classic C skills or even going down to assembler, in an environment I can understand the entire memory structure in; it'll be a massive change from the HLL SOA WTF TLA world of the day job... I soldered up a proper ATX-to-Olivetti-motherboard power adaptor and bought a slimline modern PSU. Subtly modded the case to fit and mount it and allow it to vent properly without wrecking the Oli's tidy lines. While I was in there I noticed that brown goo was oozing from the edge of the HDD... a 40Mb Conner - this may have something to do with the poor condition of my data. Wiped it all away, I hope it wasn't too toxic.

Unfortunately the BIOS is very limited and only has settings for the three specific models of hdd - 20, 40 and 100MB - that Olivetti used in those days.

So given that I am really keen to resurrect this machine both for sentimental and practical purposes
- Is it worth formatting the HDD and working on it or is it too close to death for that? (corruption rising as it's used, missing brown goo)
- Is it possible to replace it with a CompactFlash adaptor even though the BIOS won't accept any CF card sizes? Would I have to format the CF using a modern machine to appear as a 40 or 100Mb drive?
- Are any of the various impressive new-hardware-addon solutions that people have cooked up (like XT-IDE) appropriate, or is it too new/does the BIOS limit sink that?

All wisdom appreciated ;)

Thanks very much, and happy vintage computing

- justanotherhacker
 
My recommendation is to stop messing with trying to directly access the drive and stop trying chkdsk. If you can get this into a newer machine run ddrescue on the drive. If you're unfamiliar with ddrescue just look it up on youtube/google and you'll get the jist of it.
 
I like to use SpinRite II 2.0 on MFM/RLL drives. It does a nondestructive LLF so you don't lose any data. If you can't save the drive with SpinRite it's likely too far gone to save with anything.
 
I rescued my data. It is all text and so the occasional bad character doesn't matter as much, and as they're small files, they have not been too badly hit.

The problem is going on to use the computer. I don't trust the drive not to fall to bits. Given I doubt I can get a perfectly-working new 40Mb drive, can I replace it with Flash given the BIOS limits?

ETA - thanks, Spinrite sounds fairly impressive...
 
There's a few options for Hdd replacement. Looking at http://www.biffuz.it/news.php?id=101 you've got a couple of free ISA slots to play with so an IDE-CF converter in combination with a Nic with Bios XT-IDE extension.

You could also use dynamic drive overlay software(there are few to choose from)on a ide-CF or large hdd- I had a 1.2 gig quantum bigfoot running this setup on my 286/16. Set the drive up on a more modern, say pentium I-III class machine, install the overlay software, boot from a dos boot disk then use fdisk to partition the drive into suitable size partitions, boot the drive using this, load your fave OS and software then transfer the drive to the 286. As long as there is a hdd entry in the bios the drive will boot.

Having already gotten your data off the drive personally I really would'nt spend to much more time on the Conner. I had one go on my Acorn A4000 recently and wasted far too much time on it.
 
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(edit: this was in reply to Stone)
Thanks very much! That's very kind. Got to be worth a go.

(edit: added in reply to Caluser2000)
That's the exact machine! Yes, some ISA slots on a riser. I didn't know about the NIC bios technique, I'll be reading up on that. Thanks for the advice.

:) good to have something to try...
 
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Connor drives were notorious for the seal around the housing to "liquify" and become a goopy mess.
You can use different hard drives than the ones listed in the BIOS table using different methods, like a DDO or the popular XT-IDE.
 
I also had luck several times with recovering old HDDs that struggled to operate, by placing them in the freezer. I've heard of this trick 15-years ago without explanations. It successfully recovered 2 old HDDs of mine to whose I did that just before deciding to throw them away.
 
Missing brown goo?
Has the seal gone?

I had a Conner IDE I was unable to restore because it's seal had completely disintegrated and spiders started living in it.

There are lots of ways to get around the limitations. My preference:

- ask someone very nicely to burn a copy of the AT version of the XTIDE BIOS to an EPROM
- configure a network card to enable it's BootROM feature
- install the EPROM on to network card
- install network card in to computer
- if done right, after POST it'll start auto-detecting any IDE drives you have attached.

Using that, any IDE drive will do, it'll just get autodetected at startup.

Other things that could be suggested:
- find a drive with similar specs and use drive overlay software
- just find a matching drive - I actually keep a few Conner's around for this reason
- SCSI setup (Adaptec 16bit cards are common and often have BootROM's installed, this also gives you an external connector which can be handy)
 
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Descriptions of the drive seal becoming a goopy mess are exactly it. That confirms to me that this drive has no chance...

Spidersweb - thanks for the very clear description of the network card option. Now to dig about and find out if I still have an isa network card!

Thanks again

justanotherhacker
 
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