My current project is restoring a 286 computer, the first thing I had to do after cleaning the termite nest out of it was mod the Dallas 1287 clock/CMOS module to be powered from a common CR2032 battery by removing the casing with a Dremel to expose the battery pins then grinded the old battery connection away, with a section of double sided tape affixed a CR2032 battery holder to the top soldered wires to the holder, and then to the pins buried in the casing bringing it back to life. I got it to boot once or twice off the old hard drive but it died soon after, so I went ahead and added a floppy drive emulator and a CF card to IDE adapter, but I ran into a problem here, I could get the CF card to be recognized as a HDD and was able to partition it, format it but whenever files where added the file names would show up but the file would not be readable and therefore could not boot from the HDD. After a bit of research I realized that the fault was it the very limited BIOS so I went on a search for a better BIOS, but there was none for the system, after a bit more research I realized that in the era of the 286 all computers were just exact clones of the IBM even if a lot of the logic chips where integrated into a single chip, it carried out the exact same function of the discrete logic and was the same as far as the BIOS was concerned, so I could use a BIOS from any computer and it would work just fine, so I found a Quadtel Enhanced BIOS that had user settable perimeters for the HDD, got a Minipro and a few NMC27C256Q EPROM chips, as I wanted to leave the old ones as they were so at least if it didn't work I could fall back to them, I also dumped the old chips to archive them. I burned the new BIOS EPROMs and popped them into the machine and the system posted! I booted from an emulated floppy and tested it by preparing the HDD again from scratch and writing a few files to it and reading them back, it passed ! last thing to do was install DOS to the HDD and try to boot from it, it worked, now I can boot to DOS 6.22. Future plans are to correct the memory problem as only two of the four simms are being recognized leaving me with only 512 K both sets seem to work, I may just go around this by installing two one megabyte simms giving it twice the memory it had, but we will see, and to see if I can find a VGA card that will work and add a sound card, perhaps one of those new ones I've seen. It's still a work in progress but that's the fun isn't it, if it were easy to fix, it would have been boring. It's come a long way from the system that would just say CMOS battery is low then halt, to a system that will boot DOS and run software.         

Maddie,

Ahhh, 286 systems, I remember them well.

Dubbie

Maddie,

Ahhh, 286 systems, I remember them well.

Dubbie