My initial thought, when you replaced the I/O card the first time, was that the IDE card was turned in the harddrive aka plugged in the wrong way. The way the HDD led acted, and the no spinning up, triggered an old memory from back when we build those kinda systems ;)
For sure! In the end it was the cable itself. I even tested it afterwards to make sure it was installed correctly and it was - same results. Happy to have this system firing on all cylinders :)
2:45 I think you're probably right in this case, but a difference in discoloration doesn't necessarily mean anything, except that the plastic was from a different batch. Lots of machines have some parts that are not discolored at all, and some that are badly yellowed, even when all the parts are contemporary to each other. A good example is the SNES, many of which have shells that are yellowed on the top or bottom half only.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! wow- i was 32 then! My first was 8Mhz. MFM or RLL hard drive. MFM was first, then a new format was discovered. Reformat the HDD with the new format RLL and it doubled the size. I hope you know to park the heads before moving it. It wasn't always automatic. The DOS command was "park". If there were more than one HDD, the drive letter is specified after the command. On the machine, SX or DX denoted if there was a math coprocessor in it or not. They cost extra and it was a separate chip. There were certain internal mathematical equations the computer could not do without the coprocessor. Most users wouldn't know the difference. It was common to sell a SX for more money because the sales people could get away with public ignorance. That type of machine was the third one I had. Back then it was m ore common to build your own than purchase one. At the time, I built a 486 DX for about $800 and sold it for $3500 six months later. The 386 was the first to offer an integrated coprocessor. The DX versions had much realized speed differences.
The Mitsumi LU-005S was my first CD-ROM drive, circa 1994. The interface is NOT IDE/ATA. It's some proprietary stuff. Some soundcards from this era had an assortment of proprietary interfaces (Mat(su)shita/Panasonic, Sony, Mitsumi) on them, sometimes together with an additional IDE port.
@@TheRetroRecall Speed 1x, not MPC specification qualified, not multisession, probably can't read CD-R, but would be amazing if this piece of history actually works ... didn't see you try a CD
I think a lot of the early ones used SCSI for the cd-rom because it was 2x faster than the common interface of the day. I remember having a scsi zip drive 100MB at about this era and using 1 zip to install Corel Draw - mainly because it was so big, it took up a large chunk of the hard drive.
My oldest PC i have is an 286-12 PC with CoProcesor and just 640KB of RAM a 20 MB MFM HDD a VGA Card It has sadly no 30 pin Memory, it used Dram, and they are hard to find, but the Computer works just fine, even with Windows 3.0 in Realmode. I Found that computer on the Streets, years ago. Thank you for that great Video.
Those MFM hard drives sound gorgeous, don't they. I fired up my ancient Amstrad PC1640 the other day and it was a pleasure to see and hear it run up for the first time in years.
I had some sort of Olivetti with a NEC V20 CPU. It was DOS/Windows compatible. The "office suite" was not mainstream and now I shall remain awake tonight trying to remember what it was!
my initial guess was that the IDE cable was put in the wrong direction, maybe on the drive. I remember IDE drives not spinning up when the cable was put in the wrong way. Maybe you could check if that causes the same failure mode with the working cable...
Definitely a possibility with the new cable, however after a few viewer suggestions, I put the old cable back in the computer ensuring it was done correctly and the computer would not boot. Replacement cable, no problem. It is definitely a bad cable :)
Now i always went the other way? start with the absolute minimum Cards installed and add one at a time till it breaks. If you get a beep code on the first card you have your answer.
Definitely an option. However in the case there were no beep codes. That said, I wanted to test it to attempt to replicate exactly what the seller had experienced. Either was is acceptable of course :)
@@TheRetroRecall my point exactly, no beep codes means ram, cpu are OK, so bare bones with just Graphics, Keyboard and Mouse for the first start, Then you add in one at a time, Floppy, Hd.😮😮. and in your case bingo. You have your issue.. Alternatively you could have looked at the colour of the IDE cable, which is grey and denotes an 80 conductor for a ATA 66 and your drive was no doubt an ATA33 which needs a beige cable and will not run on the 80 connector. I suggest the Cable is Fine, just applied wrong. Had to drag that from the back of my memory BUT as soon as I saw the cable the alarm bells rang.. Nice video thanks
I really enjoyed this video! Glad you got the system up and running, and that old hard drive is still working after all these years. You definitely have a passion for these old machines.
Ah thanks!!!! Appreciate it. I really love sharing this old tech with everyone :). Especially when a computer is dead then comes back to life, it's a definite win!
@@TheRetroRecall it was, I already did it :-) 11th gen mobile i9 (china laptop CPU on ATX mainboard), 32GB DDR4, RTX3070m (china clone gpu), 3x 480GB sata SSD, 850W ITX PSU
I loved this trial and error method to figure out whats going on with a system. The hardest lesson I learned was when I power supply was dying. I've had two die on me and now know the symptoms. My first bad power supply still allowed the machine to boot up, but the system would quickly become less responsive over the course of two minutes and shut itself off. My second bad power supply had less symptoms and instead abruptly cutoff before or during POST.
For sure. PSUs can cause a world of issues that are far less obvious. I approached this system in a 'let's eliminate each component 1x1' way. It usually works out!
Another possible cause of those particular symptoms are bad caps on the mobo. I had a problem like that once; the system would often power off after half an hour to an hour after starting up. Putting in another mobo, with the same PSU, solved the problem. Unfortunately I don't really have the facilities to replace the bad caps. There were something like 20+ soda can capacitors and none of them looked amiss. Think it also had some solid state capacitors, and for all I know it was one of those. Ultimately, it made more sense to replace the mobo. It's my primary system and I don't have the space or the tools, or the ability to handle the system being down for days.
I've been using PCs since 1989 and never once had a problem with a power supply. My current computer is 12 years old, and the only change I've made is to upgrade from a hard drive to an SSD.
@@bite-sizedshorts9635 I'm glad that's your situation so far. However, power supplies can and do go bad. I had one go bad after around 13 years. Granted, the one I got for that system was pretty awful, but I didn't really know that at the time. It was some CoolerMaster branded one with 3 12V rails - amazed it lasted as long as it did. If you spend a bit more on PSUs that are well made, you are far less likely to have problems. Good brands are Seasonic, and Superflower I think. The ATX standard has also been around for ages, since the mid-90s with minor additions over the years, so the cool thing is that a newer PSU should be able to power anything since then.
@@TheRetroRecall Update: I got totally different POST codes with every boot, so I decided to revisit the section with the battery leak and to give it a better clean. Turns out one of the LS245 chips was already loose. Unfortunately including the solder pads on the motherboard. And since I do not have the schematics I have no chance wiring sth up. So, well, I guess I have some spare parts to test now and to add to my collection.
I've had a number of times where a IDE, SCSI, or floppy cable has gone wrong, especially on older systems, and on servers with heavy drive use. As the copper cables are quite thin over time the cables get warm and the plastic casing of the wire slightly melts into the cable and causes signal faults. I've had it where a drive either won't show within Windows, or the drive does not work correctly. I've never actually seen it where it causes a whole system to refuse to boot, so learnt something new today.
Copper work hardens, so repeated bending causes it to become brittle and can break, it's always weird to find a wire with intact insulation/jacket broken internally with no external damage 😂
Had quite a few IDE/floppy cables fail over the years usually because of the contortions in serving narrow drive bays and before we sussed that warming cables over a radiator before fitting them was a good idea. A failed IDE to the HDD would inevitably prevent boot or hang in POST. Good fun troubleshooting them though.
@@TheRetroRecallTo be honest i also expected a 286... p.s. given old stuff tendency to go boom, I generally suggest disconnecting drives from data cables when doing "first power ups". Also helps with your particular issue, because if a drive spins on power alone and stops when you connect it, you (usually) have a cable > controller > motherboard issue. Some edge cases will be if the drive doesn't spin up until it receives a signal and/or if the drive logic is good enough to spin up but shot enough not to work further. A POST card, aka port 80 card is also a good thing to have around, and you can find inexpensive ISA+PCI ones.
Thank you!!!! It's how I learned to troubleshoot these older systems and honestly could be aplloed to newer systems. Narrow down the issue and resolve. Thanks again!!
I remember the day when our "new" 386 arrived in the office with W3.1 and WordPerfect. Such a step up from MS-DOS and Wordstar. I don't miss having to rip off the margins from all the reports we had to print on microperf though. Thank you for the opportunity to reminisce.
Haha! But the sounds lol! I did a dot matrix printer video as one of my first ones. Loved watching it print out the work I just created on screen. As for ripping the tractor feeds off, I didn't mind right up until the point of ripping my document sending me ballistic! Hah
yeah i remember too the same computer in 1992 with win3.1 and word perfect... playing solitaire all day but that word perfect didnt last , ms works became popular shortly after.... those dot matrix 24 pin printers from 1991 you could print thousands of pages on a single cartridge and boy were they cheap on ink compared to today... computers were still pretty tricky then to set up all those IRQ and DMA ports to configure and conflict, all those ms dos commands in dos 5 i had to remember with a black screen, so complicated, loading that power menu red and blue menu every time instead of windows on load up.
Glad I watched the Thrifts video just in time for you to work on this system. That old cable must have a short in it cos the HDD would not even spin up & no POST.
Exactly. I was also told to check to see if it was reversed. I checked it again and it didn't work even installed correctly. In the end, just a bad cable!
I was curious if it was reversed as well. Haven’t seen a reversed cable prevent post but interesting that it’s just bad. Must be shorted in a critical spot.
in the "old days" the first step to troubleshoot "no display" was to make sure that the HDD cable wasnt plugged in reversed on one end ( super common problem ). if i recall, on the HDD side the "pin 1" (side with a red-ish color) was on the "HDD power cable" side. then on the board the "notch" should make it obvious which side it goes
Absolutely. In this case it was the cable as I did go back (after others had suggested) and confirm it was in fact connected correctly - which it was. As soon as I put the other cable back on it would boot without an issue. I am going to test that cable with a multimeter to see if I can find a short or a broken wire (as was common in my experience).
@@TheRetroRecalloh i was just giving the information, from the video we clearly see you can troubleshoot computer problem. comment wasnt pointed at you 🙂by the way this is the first video of you that i watched. it gave me nostalgic vibes 😊
Thank you so much for some great memories. I'm a long retired desktop computer repair tech and it was so amazing to see that Windows 3.1 splash screen appear. Exactly the fault finding procedure I would have followed too, had more than a few dodgy IDE cables cause problems for me back in the day! Wondering if the power supply was unscrewed because of somebody suspecting the PSU as the reason for the fault? Really enjoyed this video.
Awesome, brings back happy happy memories. My first PC was a 286SX with 40MB HD and Windows 3.1. At the peak, I had 3 PC's running continuously, a 486DX for my use, game, word processing etc, 2 x 386 SX running a Ham Radio BBS system and a Ham Radio Packet Node and Switch using 4 VHF/UHF Radios. Finally another 386 SX as a back up for either of the 2 Ham Radio connected systems. Happy days :)
I am really enjoying this channel. I am very much a computer user and no expert about what goes on inside, but it's great to see these old models being brought back to life. My first real computer, other than a ZX81 and a spectrum, was an IBM PC with 16 kb RAM, 20Mb hard card and two 5 1/4 floppy drives. When I turned it on, I could go and make myself a coffee and when I came back it would just about have booted up. Great memories of those simple screen displays and think how amazing the programmers were to get so much out of such tiny, slow components.
Haha the wait to boot up some of these older systems was a very real thing! It was such an exciting time seeing these older systems come to life and always wondering what was next. I'm glad you are enjoying the channel, happy to have you along!
Great logical approach. brought me back to me beginnings. You had the answer though by noticing the HDD light stayed on constantly. However, I'll assume you did all the steps anyway for all of us. GREAT JOB.
Thank you and yes - it's important to show the process. In this case, I assumes it was a bad IO card, cable or grounding issue. Glad we were able to get this system up and running!
Very cool find with my favourite Soundcard. I've never had an IDE cable fail like that, good to know. Great logical assessment. Gotta go watch your previous vid now.
just got back from out West and had this queue up ready to go, BUT before I watch it I must go watch the Thrift Finds video.. those are my favourite series of yours : ) brb to watch/comment on this video soon!
You don't really need the seperate CD-ROM controller card as there is a controller built into the SBPro card, as a bonus if you were to use the SBPro card to run the CD drive any CD audio would also be played via the same speakers as plugged in the sound card rather than needing separate amplified ones via the RCA plugs.
This machine brings back fond memories from when I was 10 or 11 in the early 90s, of my first system build, with help & parts from my dad. He taught me enough that I was able to soon plan an upgrade to a 486. I saved my allowance and picked out a new motherboard & CPU myself, from a catalog. He ordered them for me and I slapped together the old w/ new, and kept upgrading over time....Ultimately lead to my system building passion, and career in IT.
I called it: a 386. It was apparent to me just seeing the front panel and the configuration of drives. This reminds me of every clone computer I put together myself after going to the Cow Palace (San Francisco) Computer Fair held once a month (from memory) on Saturdays. Intel, China, Taiwan, and Korea produced all of the needed components. My very first such clone was in about 1986 or 1987 after attending an enthusiastically attended night seminar at Ft. Mason. There were many, many mom-and-pop shops all over the country that put together "clones" with their own crudely-designed brand and adhesive badge and reselling them, for those not willing to put the pieces together, themselves. This one is probably one of those. The economics of that business model eventually became unviable. Having developed my computer chops during that era, it holds little allure for me. I'm not terribly nostalgic, thank you. I'm awfully glad technological progress left all of this in the dust. I remember trying to get the first version of Photoshop to run on one of these dinosaurs. Painfully slow. Applications were entirely aspirational back then, the hardware never kept up with the ambitions of software and we were always looking hopefully to the future. Fortunately, that future eventually arrived. Now, it's on to another.
Thank's for this detailed perspective, and yes you definitely called it! I just love seeing this old tech - reminding us where we came from and reliving some of the old apps, games etc on real hardware with all of their quirks :)
Tandy sold a version of that CD-ROM drive in the early 90s - the CDR-1000. It was my first CD drive. The Tandy version had a slightly different front face on the drive and came with an 8-bit card. It's such a weird mechanism. But the alternatives at the time were almost all caddy-based drives and were a huge pain. So not having to mess with a caddy was really nice.
My first PC was an IBM 8088 with two 5.25 inch floppy drives and 64K of RAM. No hard disk. I thought it was the best thing ever. My, how far we have come. Thanks for the video and the memories.
Every time I see the 2 7-segment LED display I think it's a 486 DX2 / 66. I had a couple of these I got for free in 1997-8 that served as my router / IRC server when we first got high speed internet. What a happy day that was - no more "phone wars" with my sister (over the one phone line) :)
Not for nothing, I'm excited watching you go through this system discovery. It's fun. My first (and possibly only) alarm I see... is you yanking cards and components and messing about in the machine while plugged into power, is a BAD idea. Turning off the power doesn't stop all flow of the electric current to the machine and may be dangerous. Keep up the great work, and be careful. 😀👍
So many memories watching this video! It was fun working on the old 8 bit Z80 processor systems. Setting the IRQ's, reserving Direct Memory Address space, and blocking out Upper Memory Blocks was all a great learning experience. Some of the early functions like Booting to DOS from a 5" floppy or holding down the break key at boot so it loaded BASIC, swapping out bad E-Prom memory chips on expansion cards, and getting a FABULOUS NEW 5 MB hard drive was a dream!. Then came the Plug and Pray resources. I could go on and on but I think you know the story! Once you learned how to NOT let the smoke out and understood all PC's ran on the "FM" theory you were good to go!
That is such a nice time capsule. 100 MB HDD was boss for such a 386-system. And great, methodical troubleshooting with that harddrive. Also great having an external battery installed instead of some leaking stuff.
I have some of theses machines from 80' and 90' .. i used to earn computers so repair it just for fun you inspire me to get them back take my hobby again.
Nice video ! Actually I'm pretty sure that the original IDE cable was fine, but plugged backwards. It's the typical behavior when you reverse the IDE connector on one end : you gat a black screen, no POST and the IDE LED on. That's exactly the case here : when you observe the control panel when you power on the PC, the IDE LED is constantly on.
Thanks for the info! Another viewer had suggested that so I had tried the original cable again pinned correctly and it resulted in the same behavior. Once I put the replacement cable back on it booted again. It looks like the cable truly is bad.
Holy crap... did you did that out of the Malone Wead Library basement?! They had that EXACT computer (with a different logo badge if my memory isn't totally gone) when I was still a much younger pup, right down to the weird cd drive! They also had a Pioneer 6 cd changer which held the discs in a "cartridge" (at a blistering 2x speed) connected to the scsi card in the back so they librarian didn't' have to change the discs all the time, just a cartridge now and then. Thanks for sending my stumbling old butt down memory lane!
There were a few cases that showed up on a number of manufacturer's systems. A favourite was the "small footprint" case which was a desktop (non-tower) case with three 5.25in drive bays and a vertical 3.5in bay down the side.
Back in high school, I took office tech 1 and we used networked 386 computers with Windows 3.1 and Word Perfect version 5.1 I think. I still install it to this day on my windows 3.x machines. This brought back memories.
Awesome!!! Yes I remember some very old systems when I was first starting out that had 5.1 for dos, along with win 3.1, however they were early 486 PC's. Having it on a 386 in front of me is pretty cool!
Thank you of your interesting video of your PC found. Few days ago I found it at a flea market Dell Optiplex 755 system from 2006, included with its own LCD display. It was a very cheap found, there was -50% sales on flea market, so the total cost i paid was 5€. I made some upgrades for the system, added 2gb memory(previously was 4Gb), also a GPU. Now it is good retro machine. Keep up making these good videos :)
That's an awesome find, glad you were able to get it and upgrade it! I always tell people that if you keep your eyes open and look around, there is always a piece of retro tech hiding waiting to be found at a good deal :). Glad you enjoyed, thank you for watching!
at 13:14 my brain suddenly said "Wait, how are all of the cards FLOATING?!" It finally clicked, thank God it did because otherwise I'd be worried. Like your content btw keep it up!
ah, man, that brings back memories. Before you even had the case off, I knew that had a trident 8900CL and a soundblaster pro 2.0 in it. So iconic. That card'll play doom and duke nukem great.
Whenever I see the HDD light come on solid like that and no drive spin I always check the orientation of the IDE cable. Had a lot where they were installed upside down before cables started being keyed.
I had in the video and it didn't work. So I replaced the cable and no issue. Funny thing - I featured it in another video where I did a followup on it with the original cable and it worked perfectly. My guess - flakey cable or oxidation.
I worked on a 486 that wouldn't provide a bios prompt unless a card was removed or something affected configuration. The bios battery consisted of an external AAA battery pack, and I had to unplug it to make the configuration screen appear.
I didn’t even know a bad IDE cable could prevent a whole PC from posting… That’s a really nice machine, also these TEAC hard drives certainly aren’t the most common so it’s great that it is fully working!
Pretty pimped out rig for it's age! 386sx 33, CD-ROM, 512k video card, 5 1/4 AND 3 1/2 floppies, true Sound Blaster Pro 2.0... I bet that was a pretty penny back in the day! I wonder if that is a single speed or double speed CD-ROM? Throw a DX CPU, a little bigger HDD, a couple 2MB SIMMS and you're SET for the early 90's "Multimedia PC" experience!
To answer the question, it's an old desktop computer from the days of CRT monitors that would sit on top of the computers. You can guess at its age from the presence of the "turbo" button, which was meant to slow the computer down to operate older software properly. A computer that old probably has a hard drive that bit the dust years ago. Out of all the hard drives I still own from that era, only one (1998) can be read today.
WOW!!!! I LOVED Minesweeper!!!! I'm completely blown away that you were able to get it to post and boot so easily. American Megatrends, Config.sys, Autoexec.bat.... I'm feeling nostalgic... but I do NOT want those days to come back. And those dipswitches on that card!!!!!! I remember having to decide what we wanted in our machines and what we didn't want because we'd run out of interrupt requests. Remember INTERRUPT REQUESTS?!?!?! Now, you want to put something in your machine it's simply a question of "Do I have the room for it and will it work on my motherboard"? Yeah. Yeah.... fun.
Hahahah so true!!! It was frustrating at the time, but fun now lol! Having to relive all of those memories of setting up hardware/software just to get a game to work. Minesweeper was the devil :)
@@TheRetroRecall I loved Minesweeper. We had it on our computers at work (dispatching for AAA, graveyard shift). One of my coworkers and I got into it for a a few days where we tried to beat each others best time. I whipped the hell out of her her when I clicked on a square and the entire board auto-cleared. You can't get any faster than that so the competition stopped for good at that point.
I had (Have? Somewhere?) a CD-ROM with a similar loading mech; used it as one of various places to stash a small fold of cash (when I actually had any). Yes, mounted in a PC.
back in the days when i worked on computers a non-POST I would find the IDE ribbon would be the issue about 9 out of 10, watching this video reminded me of my first real computer that I mod so much it was a slow beast, the MOBO was big boy and I think it would still work to this day if I had it (I wish) but yeah IDE cables was a bulk of my repairs to the point that I had over 100 new ones of them (Was pricy but made me a boat load of money from those repairs) thanks for the walk down memory lane. reminds me of 1992 life.
Yes, like you I had many of these ribbon cable repairs. The frustrating ones were the intermittent ones that would work then not all due to a fracture in the cable usually caused by the design / folding of the cable. Glad you enjoyed the video :)
Takes me back to building my first pc which was a Pentium 150 MMX. I'd upgraded from a Commodore A1200 and had to learn new stuff like creating boot floppies for installing the O/S, configuring the sound blaster and I ran a 3dfx gfx card.
This is a better computer than I had all the way thru college. I went thru college on an original IBM PC with 2 5 1/4 floppy drives. That's a museum piece. You got lucky on this one
Whoa! An original IBM, nice! I don't have one of those yet. This system was truly a great find. I was lucky I was able to get it going while keeping the hardware the same. Now - just a good clean up and image of the HDD and we will be good to go!
Good video, reminds me of the old days. I had those exact programs on an IBM 386. I also owned a 286 and a 486DX. Still have my 1998 Aptiva. Fun to watch. Thank you.
This computer brings back memories. Its configuration and software is almost identical to what I had back in the early 1990s. Go 386! I used it as well as my young kids. Can't remember the last time I edited config.sys and autoexec.bat, though I do remember having to do that ... often, as more things changed and got added, mostly more software as my kids got older.
I had a 386sx with a headland chip on the mobo. My guess was a later 386 when I saw that the I/O card was short. The late 286/early 386 OEM cards mostly were the longer size. The video card (a Trident 8900 or 9000) is also on par for the era. The 8900c is the better card since it can do 1024x768x256 if fully stocked with 1MB mem. Older systems with I/O cards are also not always cableselect and can be finicky with master/slave jumpering (including requiring master only, but that seems not to be the case here)
Another fine Video Squire, I had to watch the section a couple of times when you’re showing what Cards are in the System thinking that I’d missed the description of the Sound Card and you realised that you hadn’t shown that Card at: 30:30, Graphics Card’s nothing special but as long as it works then that’s the main thing, Interesting CD-Rom Drive & like the inclusion of the Left/Right Phono Sockets on the back of the IO Card, I’ve got quite a big collection of Optical Drives of different types now but not one like that, Oh btw, I pronounce it “Mayvis” regarding the Mavis Beacon Typing, Think I’ve got a copy of that somewhere, I’ve got a 286 & 486 PC but not a 386 although I’ve recently found a couple of 386 Motherboards so will hopefully get one up & running and do a Video on it at some point soon hopefully! 🙂 Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
I worked on several AT systems back in the day before ATX became the norm. I also recycled a lot of business machines machines when they became obsolete, mostly 286/386/486 and Pentiums in that AT form factor. That was a pretty common fault. Either a pinched IDE or even the wrong orientation would cause this. Some users, while attempting to add a cdrom themselves, would often "break" their machines, causing this fault. Brought me back some cool memories from the late 90's
Found this video through the recommendations and instantly subscribed. Really like your style, especially how you go in depth to explain everything. I'm currently working on a mystery computer myself. It's an 286 that was used in a TV station to provide a time signal. It's in a 19-inch rack-mount case and contains some REALLY weird cards. Like a receiver for the DCF77 time signal transmitter in Germany, a graphics card that has three MCX coax connectors for red, green and blue aswell as a card full of EPROMs. Sadly, I can't find any information for any of those cards online. At least I caught the BIOS battery before it could leak and removed it, so one less thing to worry about :)
Now that seems like an exciting system to figure out! As you said, good thing you were able to catch the battery before disaster occurred! Good luck on the project and welcome to the channel!
Bumped into your channel and huge thank you for taking back to those computing days. You deserve a few thumbs up for explaining an old computer into a subject of conversation and joy. Thanks🫡👍👍👍👍
I wonder why that IDE cable was preventing the HDD from spinning up. Not installed the wrong way by any chance? .. I'd examine it and meter it out to see if maybe there's a short between a couple of pins.
I checked it again afterwards as it was suggested it could be installed incorrectly and the same result (even though I confirmed it was correct). I'll have to check the cable.
The floppy drives run off one cable, a twist in the cable tells the machine what one is A or B. I have seen a problem with the reset switch being shorted out causing a problem with booting, So I would of unplugged that to do trouble shooting. The turbo switch would enable cache memory. That cd rom would play a music cd rom and you could plug head phones right into the cd rom and use the volume control.
Great job on the diagnostics, and how odd that it should be a bad ribbon cable---fairly unusual. Then again, I did have a system that wouldn't post due to a bad phone modem---those almost never fail, but it did on that system
The PC was probably a local PC builder. There were so many back at that time. The only way if at all to find them would do a search of PC builders in the town you purchased it in. I am sure they are no longer in business, good luck. The fact the PC doesn't have a modem means no internet yet for that builder to display their company. In my home town we had a local PC builder that did this and charged a lot more for the PCs. People would buy them because they said you would get local support.
For sure. A few have suggested this as at the time many local companies were popping up only to close down a year or so later - leaving their mark with their self branded PC's. Neat piece of history though.
My first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer. My hardware guy and I had maxed it out with (if I recall correctly) 56K of static RAM. I had also purchased the S-100 expansion box for it, and eventually got it to run North Star DOS, which required expensive hard sector 5.25” diskettes. At some point, my hardware guy, (who by this time had become my best man,) had re-written the firmware for the disk controller so that it could work with both hard and soft sector diskettes, and I started running both CP/M and N* DOS. I also got into programming in Forth and created a diskette that allowed me to boot up with Forth as the OS. I really loved that machine. Sadly, a bad hardware design choice caused it to die a horrible death, and ultimately it was scrapped. The problem was that the (I think) power transistor’s leads were used to support a heat sink, and every time the case was opened, it had sagged and I stupidly pulled it up each time without ever thinking about putting in some kind of support. The middle lead finally broke and (I presume) allowed it too much current or voltage to fry the circuitry. To this day I still miss that machine. The machine I have now is probably orders of magnitude better than that old Sorcerer, but I have no clue as to how I’d ever get it to boot up in Forth if I wanted to.
This was my first PC that i inherited from a relative as he upgraded, around 1997-98 ... amazing. Oh.. and ... the turbo button didnt do crap back then either... haha! I just remember it lighting the diode... well good video bro! Subscribed!
Turbo is actually the computer's standard speed, the one stated on the processor and in the advert you saw before you bought it. If you turn turbo off, it's a slower speed for the sake of compatibility with some software (particularly games) which relied on an older processor's slower clock speed.
Oldest PC i recently obtained (which the case is being used for a sleeper build) is a pentium II system with the slot-2 cpu type. Is my second system with ISA slots, first one being a save from being tossed.
Wow, such a great video. Had one of these computer in the mid 90s. Would spend hours and hours daily playing with Win 3.1, Solitary, and shareware games. Still have a few old computers in the garage, and going to give it a round or two of dusting it up and turning it back on.
That Teac HDD is rare itself, even moreso to have one that still works, as these weren't exactly known to be reliable (which destroyed their reputation and caused them to leave the HDD market)
Thanks for letting me know that, I had no idea. To be honest, I do not remember seeing many TEAC drives around outside of the 5.25 drives so that makes a lot of sense. Thanks again!
We had that same computer model in our lounge in the early 90s. It had no internet access. Tenants used it for Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. You KNOW you're old if you can still remember the keyboard template for Word Perfect. Let's get freaky and merge. 😅
Bahahahahaha yes I am that old lol. However I would say I was quite young when I saw keyboards with the templates taped all over them - often ripped with some hand written text haha!
In 1995-96 I worked for a non-profit that often received donations of PCs. Many were late 80s/early90s PCs and back then of course a 3-4 year old PC was basically considered obsolete. Some were name brand, many many clones. I basically did what you are doing in the video, except with a few hundred PCs at a time. I would check them over, clean them up, and then we would sell them, usually for $200 and the proceeds went to the IT department of the non-profit. Of course a lot of these PCs were despite being not that old at the time, not really salvageable or useful --- so before sending them to the recycler I would strip them for parts. My on hand "spares" area of the equipment room sort of got out of control. :) The good news was though, generally if we had a failure of a PC in the office, I could repair it from parts on-hand without having to spend any money. As a non-profit we were always strapped for cash. This brings back memories of an "exciting" part of my life where I still considered computing "fun". Thank you for making this video!
Usually to show the CPU set speed. The display either had jumpers on the back to set the speed for looks, or the turbo button would trigger a change of connected.
This is the first pc i had as a child.. wow.. i so wish i had this machine again! Thankyou for the memories, please take good care of it!
❤
That's awesome and I will!! I plan on doing a restoration video on it, so stay tuned! :)
Windows 3.1. Wow, I still remember my first pc and standing in line at Walmart in 1995 to get the Windows ‘95 upgrade.
Yes!!!
My initial thought, when you replaced the I/O card the first time, was that the IDE card was turned in the harddrive aka plugged in the wrong way.
The way the HDD led acted, and the no spinning up, triggered an old memory from back when we build those kinda systems ;)
For sure! In the end it was the cable itself. I even tested it afterwards to make sure it was installed correctly and it was - same results. Happy to have this system firing on all cylinders :)
2:45 I think you're probably right in this case, but a difference in discoloration doesn't necessarily mean anything, except that the plastic was from a different batch.
Lots of machines have some parts that are not discolored at all, and some that are badly yellowed, even when all the parts are contemporary to each other.
A good example is the SNES, many of which have shells that are yellowed on the top or bottom half only.
Good call out.
19:01 that was the most genuine cheer I ever heard on one of these retro videos.
Haha it was truly genuine! I was shocked (and pleased) as it was the last step before looking towards the MB.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! wow- i was 32 then! My first was 8Mhz.
MFM or RLL hard drive. MFM was first, then a new format was discovered. Reformat the HDD with the new format RLL and it doubled the size. I hope you know to park the heads before moving it. It wasn't always automatic. The DOS command was "park". If there were more than one HDD, the drive letter is specified after the command.
On the machine, SX or DX denoted if there was a math coprocessor in it or not. They cost extra and it was a separate chip. There were certain internal mathematical equations the computer could not do without the coprocessor. Most users wouldn't know the difference. It was common to sell a SX for more money because the sales people could get away with public ignorance.
That type of machine was the third one I had. Back then it was m ore common to build your own than purchase one. At the time, I built a 486 DX for about $800 and sold it for $3500 six months later. The 386 was the first to offer an integrated coprocessor. The DX versions had much realized speed differences.
That's awesome and yes, I remember the park heads or PH command in DOS. I'm glad that's done automatically now :). Thanks for sharing!
The Mitsumi LU-005S was my first CD-ROM drive, circa 1994. The interface is NOT IDE/ATA. It's some proprietary stuff. Some soundcards from this era had an assortment of proprietary interfaces (Mat(su)shita/Panasonic, Sony, Mitsumi) on them, sometimes together with an additional IDE port.
Yes. I have a couple of SB cards that have the 3 interfaces on them. Makes sense why it has its own controller card.
@@TheRetroRecall Speed 1x, not MPC specification qualified, not multisession, probably can't read CD-R, but would be amazing if this piece of history actually works ... didn't see you try a CD
Saving the CD, floppy drives etc for the restoration vid - part 2 :)
I think a lot of the early ones used SCSI for the cd-rom because it was 2x faster than the common interface of the day. I remember having a scsi zip drive 100MB at about this era and using 1 zip to install Corel Draw - mainly because it was so big, it took up a large chunk of the hard drive.
Great info thanks I have one of those drives and forgot what interface it was
My oldest PC i have is an 286-12 PC with CoProcesor and just 640KB of RAM a 20 MB MFM HDD a VGA Card
It has sadly no 30 pin Memory, it used Dram, and they are hard to find,
but the Computer works just fine, even with Windows 3.0 in Realmode.
I Found that computer on the Streets, years ago.
Thank you for that great Video.
That 286 sounds pretty cool! I don't have one in the collection yet :). You are welcome, glad you enjoyed!!
Those MFM hard drives sound gorgeous, don't they. I fired up my ancient Amstrad PC1640 the other day and it was a pleasure to see and hear it run up for the first time in years.
One of the old PC-XTs I inherited from my Dad would still boot into basic.
I had some sort of Olivetti with a NEC V20 CPU. It was DOS/Windows compatible. The "office suite" was not mainstream and now I shall remain awake tonight trying to remember what it was!
Lotus 123? MS works? Corel Suite?
IRQ 2 and IRQ 9 conflicts along with IRQ 14/15 were the bane of my existance with older hardware
I can't remember exactly what conflicts caused me grief, however they definitely existed!
Mouse scrolling garbage data across the screen when it conflicted with the modem. I hear ya!
Oh boy, those noises sound familiar, I started with a 386 and at one point used Old AMDs and Cyrix processors,
Thanks ❤️
No problem! Definitely brings back some great memories.
my initial guess was that the IDE cable was put in the wrong direction, maybe on the drive. I remember IDE drives not spinning up when the cable was put in the wrong way.
Maybe you could check if that causes the same failure mode with the working cable...
Definitely a possibility with the new cable, however after a few viewer suggestions, I put the old cable back in the computer ensuring it was done correctly and the computer would not boot. Replacement cable, no problem. It is definitely a bad cable :)
I like that you showed how to troubleshoot a computer by removing one card at a time. That's the way to do so you can find out what is wrong with it.
Thanks, and I agree - it's the way I've been taught when tracking down an issue.
Now i always went the other way? start with the absolute minimum Cards installed and add one at a time till it breaks.
If you get a beep code on the first card you have your answer.
Definitely an option. However in the case there were no beep codes. That said, I wanted to test it to attempt to replicate exactly what the seller had experienced. Either was is acceptable of course :)
@@TheRetroRecall my point exactly, no beep codes means ram, cpu are OK, so bare bones with just Graphics, Keyboard and Mouse for the first start, Then you add in one at a time, Floppy, Hd.😮😮. and in your case bingo. You have your issue..
Alternatively you could have looked at the colour of the IDE cable, which is grey and denotes an 80 conductor for a ATA 66 and your drive was no doubt an ATA33 which needs a beige cable and will not run on the 80 connector.
I suggest the Cable is Fine, just applied wrong.
Had to drag that from the back of my memory BUT as soon as I saw the cable the alarm bells rang..
Nice video thanks
Ahhhhhhh good call. Never thought about the 80 VS 40. I'll have to check that out. Thanks!!
I really enjoyed this video! Glad you got the system up and running, and that old hard drive is still working after all these years. You definitely have a passion for these old machines.
For sure! I love when they come back to life and are preserved, shared for all to enjoy :)
This comment made me watch the whole video. Thank you.
You're welcome!!
Loved this…your content is so engaging!! Great job!! Also love your genuine enthusiasm!! Keep ‘em coming!!
Ah thanks!!!! Appreciate it. I really love sharing this old tech with everyone :). Especially when a computer is dead then comes back to life, it's a definite win!
I really wish that computers still came in this basic style case. I'm so sick of towers...
100%! I think SilverStone still makes the desktop form factor. :)
Buy an old desktop ATX case and build a retro sleeper with modern hardware inside 😊
That would be a cool build
@@TheRetroRecall it was, I already did it :-) 11th gen mobile i9 (china laptop CPU on ATX mainboard), 32GB DDR4, RTX3070m (china clone gpu), 3x 480GB sata SSD, 850W ITX PSU
Now that's pretty sweet!!!!
I loved this trial and error method to figure out whats going on with a system. The hardest lesson I learned was when I power supply was dying. I've had two die on me and now know the symptoms. My first bad power supply still allowed the machine to boot up, but the system would quickly become less responsive over the course of two minutes and shut itself off. My second bad power supply had less symptoms and instead abruptly cutoff before or during POST.
For sure. PSUs can cause a world of issues that are far less obvious. I approached this system in a 'let's eliminate each component 1x1' way. It usually works out!
Another possible cause of those particular symptoms are bad caps on the mobo. I had a problem like that once; the system would often power off after half an hour to an hour after starting up. Putting in another mobo, with the same PSU, solved the problem. Unfortunately I don't really have the facilities to replace the bad caps. There were something like 20+ soda can capacitors and none of them looked amiss. Think it also had some solid state capacitors, and for all I know it was one of those. Ultimately, it made more sense to replace the mobo. It's my primary system and I don't have the space or the tools, or the ability to handle the system being down for days.
I've been using PCs since 1989 and never once had a problem with a power supply. My current computer is 12 years old, and the only change I've made is to upgrade from a hard drive to an SSD.
@@bite-sizedshorts9635 I'm glad that's your situation so far. However, power supplies can and do go bad. I had one go bad after around 13 years. Granted, the one I got for that system was pretty awful, but I didn't really know that at the time. It was some CoolerMaster branded one with 3 12V rails - amazed it lasted as long as it did. If you spend a bit more on PSUs that are well made, you are far less likely to have problems. Good brands are Seasonic, and Superflower I think. The ATX standard has also been around for ages, since the mid-90s with minor additions over the years, so the cool thing is that a newer PSU should be able to power anything since then.
Lucky you and congrats! I am currently dealing with RAM issues on my vintage 386SX. Thx for the content.
No problem at all, happy to get this system and get it running again! Hopefully you can get yours going again - maybe some contact cleaner?
@@TheRetroRecall Update: I got totally different POST codes with every boot, so I decided to revisit the section with the battery leak and to give it a better clean. Turns out one of the LS245 chips was already loose. Unfortunately including the solder pads on the motherboard. And since I do not have the schematics I have no chance wiring sth up. So, well, I guess I have some spare parts to test now and to add to my collection.
That's unfortunate. That's why it's so important for all of the retro community to upload everything we get, find to archive.org.
I've had a number of times where a IDE, SCSI, or floppy cable has gone wrong, especially on older systems, and on servers with heavy drive use. As the copper cables are quite thin over time the cables get warm and the plastic casing of the wire slightly melts into the cable and causes signal faults. I've had it where a drive either won't show within Windows, or the drive does not work correctly. I've never actually seen it where it causes a whole system to refuse to boot, so learnt something new today.
Absolutely. This was my first as well!
Copper work hardens, so repeated bending causes it to become brittle and can break, it's always weird to find a wire with intact insulation/jacket broken internally with no external damage 😂
That surprised me too. I would think a serious short would be required to stop the HD from spinning up. So I am surprised nothing else was damaged.
Had quite a few IDE/floppy cables fail over the years usually because of the contortions in serving narrow drive bays and before we sussed that warming cables over a radiator before fitting them was a good idea. A failed IDE to the HDD would inevitably prevent boot or hang in POST. Good fun troubleshooting them though.
I was too, especially where I had turned it off and on many times. That said, it could be a break in the cable?
Damn, that case was such a throwback... moment you showed the back i went "that's no 486" :D
Haha indeed. To be honest, I truly thought it was going to be a 286, but I'm very happy with he results!
@@TheRetroRecallTo be honest i also expected a 286...
p.s. given old stuff tendency to go boom, I generally suggest disconnecting drives from data cables when doing "first power ups". Also helps with your particular issue, because if a drive spins on power alone and stops when you connect it, you (usually) have a cable > controller > motherboard issue. Some edge cases will be if the drive doesn't spin up until it receives a signal and/or if the drive logic is good enough to spin up but shot enough not to work further. A POST card, aka port 80 card is also a good thing to have around, and you can find inexpensive ISA+PCI ones.
That case reminds me of the old console TVs or console stereo systems. All it needs is some wood grain paneling.
Back in the day, AST was considered a premium PC.
I'm familiar with AST, not sure if this system was them or not. I know I did a video on an AST system, it was fun!
Great job pulling out and swapping curds. High level technical work. High five!
Thank you!!!! It's how I learned to troubleshoot these older systems and honestly could be aplloed to newer systems. Narrow down the issue and resolve. Thanks again!!
Beep Beep! Sarcasm detected! Beep Beep!
I remember the day when our "new" 386 arrived in the office with W3.1 and WordPerfect. Such a step up from MS-DOS and Wordstar. I don't miss having to rip off the margins from all the reports we had to print on microperf though. Thank you for the opportunity to reminisce.
Haha! But the sounds lol! I did a dot matrix printer video as one of my first ones. Loved watching it print out the work I just created on screen. As for ripping the tractor feeds off, I didn't mind right up until the point of ripping my document sending me ballistic! Hah
yeah i remember too the same computer in 1992 with win3.1 and word perfect... playing solitaire all day but that word perfect didnt last , ms works became popular shortly after.... those dot matrix 24 pin printers from 1991 you could print thousands of pages on a single cartridge and boy were they cheap on ink compared to today... computers were still pretty tricky then to set up all those IRQ and DMA ports to configure and conflict, all those ms dos commands in dos 5 i had to remember with a black screen, so complicated, loading that power menu red and blue menu every time instead of windows on load up.
Glad I watched the Thrifts video just in time for you to work on this system. That old cable must have a short in it cos the HDD would not even spin up & no POST.
Exactly. I was also told to check to see if it was reversed. I checked it again and it didn't work even installed correctly. In the end, just a bad cable!
I was curious if it was reversed as well. Haven’t seen a reversed cable prevent post but interesting that it’s just bad. Must be shorted in a critical spot.
Shorted or maybe a broken connection on a critical pathway?
Absolutely insane what stopped it from POSTing! Glad you got it working and the HDD was working as well! Another one to add to the collection!
100%! It's a great little machine.
@@TheRetroRecall Was the cable bad or out of position or crossed, can't remember if a reversed IDE cable kills anything or caused a lockup
Yeah, many have said it could be a reversed cable, however I tried it again and double checked after and same thing happened.
in the "old days" the first step to troubleshoot "no display" was to make sure that the HDD cable wasnt plugged in reversed on one end ( super common problem ). if i recall, on the HDD side the "pin 1" (side with a red-ish color) was on the "HDD power cable" side. then on the board the "notch" should make it obvious which side it goes
Absolutely. In this case it was the cable as I did go back (after others had suggested) and confirm it was in fact connected correctly - which it was. As soon as I put the other cable back on it would boot without an issue. I am going to test that cable with a multimeter to see if I can find a short or a broken wire (as was common in my experience).
@@TheRetroRecalloh i was just giving the information, from the video we clearly see you can troubleshoot computer problem. comment wasnt pointed at you 🙂by the way this is the first video of you that i watched. it gave me nostalgic vibes 😊
Ohhhh no I know, no worries haha! My reply was just to put out there what I did... All good!!! :)
Thank you so much for some great memories. I'm a long retired desktop computer repair tech and it was so amazing to see that Windows 3.1 splash screen appear. Exactly the fault finding procedure I would have followed too, had more than a few dodgy IDE cables cause problems for me back in the day! Wondering if the power supply was unscrewed because of somebody suspecting the PSU as the reason for the fault? Really enjoyed this video.
I spoke to the seller and he said he opened it up and not much else.. But you never know so that is definitely possible :) glad you enjoyed the video!
Hahah the previous owner.
Awesome, brings back happy happy memories. My first PC was a 286SX with 40MB HD and Windows 3.1. At the peak, I had 3 PC's running continuously, a 486DX for my use, game, word processing etc, 2 x 386 SX running a Ham Radio BBS system and a Ham Radio Packet Node and Switch using 4 VHF/UHF Radios. Finally another 386 SX as a back up for either of the 2 Ham Radio connected systems. Happy days :)
That's awesome and yes, amazing memories.
I am really enjoying this channel. I am very much a computer user and no expert about what goes on inside, but it's great to see these old models being brought back to life. My first real computer, other than a ZX81 and a spectrum, was an IBM PC with 16 kb RAM, 20Mb hard card and two 5 1/4 floppy drives. When I turned it on, I could go and make myself a coffee and when I came back it would just about have booted up. Great memories of those simple screen displays and think how amazing the programmers were to get so much out of such tiny, slow components.
Haha the wait to boot up some of these older systems was a very real thing! It was such an exciting time seeing these older systems come to life and always wondering what was next. I'm glad you are enjoying the channel, happy to have you along!
Great logical approach. brought me back to me beginnings. You had the answer though by noticing the HDD light stayed on constantly. However, I'll assume you did all the steps anyway for all of us. GREAT JOB.
Thank you and yes - it's important to show the process. In this case, I assumes it was a bad IO card, cable or grounding issue. Glad we were able to get this system up and running!
Very cool find with my favourite Soundcard. I've never had an IDE cable fail like that, good to know. Great logical assessment. Gotta go watch your previous vid now.
Agreed, a pretty nice soundcard indeed! I hope you enjoy the other content and stay tuned for tomorrows release :)
just got back from out West and had this queue up ready to go, BUT before I watch it I must go watch the Thrift Finds video.. those are my favourite series of yours : )
brb to watch/comment on this video soon!
Awesome! Welcome back!
You don't really need the seperate CD-ROM controller card as there is a controller built into the SBPro card, as a bonus if you were to use the SBPro card to run the CD drive any CD audio would also be played via the same speakers as plugged in the sound card rather than needing separate amplified ones via the RCA plugs.
Nice! I thought it may be a different standard (the interface card VS the SB card).
This machine brings back fond memories from when I was 10 or 11 in the early 90s, of my first system build, with help & parts from my dad. He taught me enough that I was able to soon plan an upgrade to a 486. I saved my allowance and picked out a new motherboard & CPU myself, from a catalog. He ordered them for me and I slapped together the old w/ new, and kept upgrading over time....Ultimately lead to my system building passion, and career in IT.
Haha that's an amazing memory and sounds much like my story!
3:39 "I really need to invest in some kind of turn table"
Buy a cake stand. They're meant to hold a lot of weight and still turn.
Smart. I will have to look for one this weekend - I mean, its a PITA to move these systems around :)
I called it: a 386. It was apparent to me just seeing the front panel and the configuration of drives. This reminds me of every clone computer I put together myself after going to the Cow Palace (San Francisco) Computer Fair held once a month (from memory) on Saturdays. Intel, China, Taiwan, and Korea produced all of the needed components. My very first such clone was in about 1986 or 1987 after attending an enthusiastically attended night seminar at Ft. Mason. There were many, many mom-and-pop shops all over the country that put together "clones" with their own crudely-designed brand and adhesive badge and reselling them, for those not willing to put the pieces together, themselves. This one is probably one of those. The economics of that business model eventually became unviable. Having developed my computer chops during that era, it holds little allure for me. I'm not terribly nostalgic, thank you. I'm awfully glad technological progress left all of this in the dust. I remember trying to get the first version of Photoshop to run on one of these dinosaurs. Painfully slow. Applications were entirely aspirational back then, the hardware never kept up with the ambitions of software and we were always looking hopefully to the future. Fortunately, that future eventually arrived. Now, it's on to another.
Thank's for this detailed perspective, and yes you definitely called it! I just love seeing this old tech - reminding us where we came from and reliving some of the old apps, games etc on real hardware with all of their quirks :)
Tandy sold a version of that CD-ROM drive in the early 90s - the CDR-1000. It was my first CD drive. The Tandy version had a slightly different front face on the drive and came with an 8-bit card. It's such a weird mechanism. But the alternatives at the time were almost all caddy-based drives and were a huge pain. So not having to mess with a caddy was really nice.
Yes I remember my first interaction was a Sony caddy 1x drive. Constant buffer underruns in that thing but when it worked, I was so pleased.
I subscribed before the 4K and I have absolutely no regret =)
Love having you here! Thanks for sticking around for the craziness :)
My first PC was an IBM 8088 with two 5.25 inch floppy drives and 64K of RAM. No hard disk. I thought it was the best thing ever. My, how far we have come. Thanks for the video and the memories.
Your welcome and you are right, quite a ways!
This brings back SO MANY memories!! Computers were so great then... My first computer had a harddrive of.... drumroll... 10MB
Haha! You will NEVER fill all of that space!
Every time I see the 2 7-segment LED display I think it's a 486 DX2 / 66. I had a couple of these I got for free in 1997-8 that served as my router / IRC server when we first got high speed internet. What a happy day that was - no more "phone wars" with my sister (over the one phone line) :)
Hahah yes! I have quite. A bit of memories of those days :)
TY, Man did that video take me back. It took me back when I was a newbie at teching. 29 years ago.
Haha that's great!! Nostalgic memories are the best :)
A lucky find!👍👍 In my opinion, it looks like it would have been used in an education establishment.
Ah very possible. Lots of word processing, security and educational software.
Not for nothing, I'm excited watching you go through this system discovery. It's fun. My first (and possibly only) alarm I see... is you yanking cards and components and messing about in the machine while plugged into power, is a BAD idea. Turning off the power doesn't stop all flow of the electric current to the machine and may be dangerous.
Keep up the great work, and be careful. 😀👍
That's some great info! To be honest that has never crossed my mind nor has anyone ever said that to me. Appreciate it!!! Also, thanks for watching :)
So many memories watching this video! It was fun working on the old 8 bit Z80 processor systems. Setting the IRQ's, reserving Direct Memory Address space, and blocking out Upper Memory Blocks was all a great learning experience. Some of the early functions like Booting to DOS from a 5" floppy or holding down the break key at boot so it loaded BASIC, swapping out bad E-Prom memory chips on expansion cards, and getting a FABULOUS NEW 5 MB hard drive was a dream!. Then came the Plug and Pray resources. I could go on and on but I think you know the story! Once you learned how to NOT let the smoke out and understood all PC's ran on the "FM" theory you were good to go!
Hahahaha indeed! Just reading your comment triggered some memories.
That is such a nice time capsule. 100 MB HDD was boss for such a 386-system. And great, methodical troubleshooting with that harddrive. Also great having an external battery installed instead of some leaking stuff.
Agreed and thank you! Yes, the discovery of an external battery VS a Varta truly saved this machine from the very beginning.
I have some of theses machines from 80' and 90' .. i used to earn computers so repair it just for fun you inspire me to get them back take my hobby again.
I love that!!! It's a fun and exciting hobby :) That and it brings back some awesome memories.
GREAT video! Love these sort of Mystery PC videos. Keep up the amazing work!
Thank you!
Nice video ! Actually I'm pretty sure that the original IDE cable was fine, but plugged backwards. It's the typical behavior when you reverse the IDE connector on one end : you gat a black screen, no POST and the IDE LED on. That's exactly the case here : when you observe the control panel when you power on the PC, the IDE LED is constantly on.
Thanks for the info! Another viewer had suggested that so I had tried the original cable again pinned correctly and it resulted in the same behavior. Once I put the replacement cable back on it booted again. It looks like the cable truly is bad.
But i got a same one 386dx40 and same cdrom end the rest also
Nice!!!! Do you still have it today? Does it work?
That machine is a thing of beauty, my friend, and I was probably as pleased as you when this old boy booted up.
This video made my night 😎👍
Haha totally and amazing! Glad you enjoyed!
Holy crap... did you did that out of the Malone Wead Library basement?! They had that EXACT computer (with a different logo badge if my memory isn't totally gone) when I was still a much younger pup, right down to the weird cd drive!
They also had a Pioneer 6 cd changer which held the discs in a "cartridge" (at a blistering 2x speed) connected to the scsi card in the back so they librarian didn't' have to change the discs all the time, just a cartridge now and then.
Thanks for sending my stumbling old butt down memory lane!
Hahaha no worries... glad you enjoyed and happy it brought back some memories for you!
There were a few cases that showed up on a number of manufacturer's systems. A favourite was the "small footprint" case which was a desktop (non-tower) case with three 5.25in drive bays and a vertical 3.5in bay down the side.
Dude, you got Maahjong!!!
Haha yes!
Back in high school, I took office tech 1 and we used networked 386 computers with Windows 3.1 and Word Perfect version 5.1 I think. I still install it to this day on my windows 3.x machines. This brought back memories.
Awesome!!! Yes I remember some very old systems when I was first starting out that had 5.1 for dos, along with win 3.1, however they were early 486 PC's. Having it on a 386 in front of me is pretty cool!
@@TheRetroRecall it is all pretty cool
Thank you of your interesting video of your PC found.
Few days ago I found it at a flea market Dell Optiplex 755 system from 2006, included with its own LCD display.
It was a very cheap found, there was -50% sales on flea market, so the total cost i paid was 5€. I made some upgrades for the system, added 2gb memory(previously was 4Gb), also a GPU. Now it is good retro machine.
Keep up making these good videos :)
That's an awesome find, glad you were able to get it and upgrade it! I always tell people that if you keep your eyes open and look around, there is always a piece of retro tech hiding waiting to be found at a good deal :). Glad you enjoyed, thank you for watching!
at 13:14 my brain suddenly said "Wait, how are all of the cards FLOATING?!" It finally clicked, thank God it did because otherwise I'd be worried. Like your content btw keep it up!
Haha thanks - it was magic 😂😂
ah, man, that brings back memories. Before you even had the case off, I knew that had a trident 8900CL and a soundblaster pro 2.0 in it. So iconic. That card'll play doom and duke nukem great.
It's funny because after I had imaged the HDD, I thew doom on here and played for a bit. It's nice having real hardware from this era to play on.
Whenever I see the HDD light come on solid like that and no drive spin I always check the orientation of the IDE cable. Had a lot where they were installed upside down before cables started being keyed.
I had in the video and it didn't work. So I replaced the cable and no issue. Funny thing - I featured it in another video where I did a followup on it with the original cable and it worked perfectly. My guess - flakey cable or oxidation.
I worked on a 486 that wouldn't provide a bios prompt unless a card was removed or something affected configuration. The bios battery consisted of an external AAA battery pack, and I had to unplug it to make the configuration screen appear.
I've worked on a few systems like that before. I have an Aopen socket 7 board like that.
I didn’t even know a bad IDE cable could prevent a whole PC from posting…
That’s a really nice machine, also these TEAC hard drives certainly aren’t the most common so it’s great that it is fully working!
For sure and yes I've also been told that a reversed cable can do the same thing :)
Pretty pimped out rig for it's age! 386sx 33, CD-ROM, 512k video card, 5 1/4 AND 3 1/2 floppies, true Sound Blaster Pro 2.0... I bet that was a pretty penny back in the day! I wonder if that is a single speed or double speed CD-ROM?
Throw a DX CPU, a little bigger HDD, a couple 2MB SIMMS and you're SET for the early 90's "Multimedia PC" experience!
Haha indeed!! It is a 1x Mitsumi drive :) lightning fast!
To answer the question, it's an old desktop computer from the days of CRT monitors that would sit on top of the computers. You can guess at its age from the presence of the "turbo" button, which was meant to slow the computer down to operate older software properly. A computer that old probably has a hard drive that bit the dust years ago. Out of all the hard drives I still own from that era, only one (1998) can be read today.
Haha did you watch the video?
Takes me back to my first 386 back in the 90s, ive had a couple of cheap ide cables go bad even expensive ones
It's hard to believe something so simple could cause the issue. Most people probably tossed them as a result.
WOW!!!! I LOVED Minesweeper!!!! I'm completely blown away that you were able to get it to post and boot so easily. American Megatrends, Config.sys, Autoexec.bat.... I'm feeling nostalgic... but I do NOT want those days to come back. And those dipswitches on that card!!!!!! I remember having to decide what we wanted in our machines and what we didn't want because we'd run out of interrupt requests. Remember INTERRUPT REQUESTS?!?!?! Now, you want to put something in your machine it's simply a question of "Do I have the room for it and will it work on my motherboard"? Yeah. Yeah.... fun.
Hahahah so true!!! It was frustrating at the time, but fun now lol! Having to relive all of those memories of setting up hardware/software just to get a game to work. Minesweeper was the devil :)
@@TheRetroRecall I loved Minesweeper. We had it on our computers at work (dispatching for AAA, graveyard shift). One of my coworkers and I got into it for a a few days where we tried to beat each others best time. I whipped the hell out of her her when I clicked on a square and the entire board auto-cleared. You can't get any faster than that so the competition stopped for good at that point.
Hahaha!! That's great.
I had (Have? Somewhere?) a CD-ROM with a similar loading mech; used it as one of various places to stash a small fold of cash (when I actually had any). Yes, mounted in a PC.
Haha no way! Well, no cash in this one lol.
back in the days when i worked on computers a non-POST I would find the IDE ribbon would be the issue about 9 out of 10, watching this video reminded me of my first real computer that I mod so much it was a slow beast, the MOBO was big boy and I think it would still work to this day if I had it (I wish) but yeah IDE cables was a bulk of my repairs to the point that I had over 100 new ones of them (Was pricy but made me a boat load of money from those repairs) thanks for the walk down memory lane. reminds me of 1992 life.
Yes, like you I had many of these ribbon cable repairs. The frustrating ones were the intermittent ones that would work then not all due to a fracture in the cable usually caused by the design / folding of the cable. Glad you enjoyed the video :)
Brings back loads of memories. Thanks for sharing! I was in 8th grade.
Awesome, that's what this channel is all about!! Glad you enjoyed :)
Takes me back to building my first pc which was a Pentium 150 MMX. I'd upgraded from a Commodore A1200 and had to learn new stuff like creating boot floppies for installing the O/S, configuring the sound blaster and I ran a 3dfx gfx card.
Nice setup! They were fun times indeed :)
This is a better computer than I had all the way thru college. I went thru college on an original IBM PC with 2 5 1/4 floppy drives. That's a museum piece. You got lucky on this one
Whoa! An original IBM, nice! I don't have one of those yet. This system was truly a great find. I was lucky I was able to get it going while keeping the hardware the same. Now - just a good clean up and image of the HDD and we will be good to go!
Good video, reminds me of the old days. I had those exact programs on an IBM 386. I also owned a 286 and a 486DX. Still have my 1998 Aptiva. Fun to watch. Thank you.
That's awesome and glad to hear you still have the old systems. Glad you enjoyed!!
This computer brings back memories. Its configuration and software is almost identical to what I had back in the early 1990s. Go 386! I used it as well as my young kids. Can't remember the last time I edited config.sys and autoexec.bat, though I do remember having to do that ... often, as more things changed and got added, mostly more software as my kids got older.
That's awesome! Hopefully you still have some sort of retro tech laying around that you can relive these memories on again. :)
I had a 386sx with a headland chip on the mobo. My guess was a later 386 when I saw that the I/O card was short. The late 286/early 386 OEM cards mostly were the longer size. The video card (a Trident 8900 or 9000) is also on par for the era. The 8900c is the better card since it can do 1024x768x256 if fully stocked with 1MB mem. Older systems with I/O cards are also not always cableselect and can be finicky with master/slave jumpering (including requiring master only, but that seems not to be the case here)
Thank you for the additional insight! Much appreciated. It's a really cool system :)
I built one of these in the early 90's. I always wanted the latest innovation, but kept the old stuff as well.
Love that. I was similar then ended up getting rid of my stuff. In hindsight I wish I hadn't :)
This brings back a lot of good memories. Thanks for sharing.
Your welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed!
Another fine Video Squire, I had to watch the section a couple of times when you’re showing what Cards are in the System thinking that I’d missed the description of the Sound Card and you realised that you hadn’t shown that Card at: 30:30, Graphics Card’s nothing special but as long as it works then that’s the main thing, Interesting CD-Rom Drive & like the inclusion of the Left/Right Phono Sockets on the back of the IO Card, I’ve got quite a big collection of Optical Drives of different types now but not one like that, Oh btw, I pronounce it “Mayvis” regarding the Mavis Beacon Typing, Think I’ve got a copy of that somewhere, I’ve got a 286 & 486 PC but not a 386 although I’ve recently found a couple of 386 Motherboards so will hopefully get one up & running and do a Video on it at some point soon hopefully! 🙂 Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
Hi Anthony - I would LOVE to see you do one of those videos!
What a gem of a machine frozen from early 90s era and that hard drive sounding so sweet.
Yes and deserving a full image so I don't lose any of the info! :). There's just something about spinning rust that gets me every time. :)
I worked on several AT systems back in the day before ATX became the norm.
I also recycled a lot of business machines machines when they became obsolete, mostly 286/386/486 and Pentiums in that AT form factor.
That was a pretty common fault. Either a pinched IDE or even the wrong orientation would cause this. Some users, while attempting to add a cdrom themselves, would often "break" their machines, causing this fault.
Brought me back some cool memories from the late 90's
Yes and that's great - glad this brought back some memories for you. I loved working on this machine and of course seeing it come back to life!
Found this video through the recommendations and instantly subscribed. Really like your style, especially how you go in depth to explain everything.
I'm currently working on a mystery computer myself. It's an 286 that was used in a TV station to provide a time signal. It's in a 19-inch rack-mount case and contains some REALLY weird cards. Like a receiver for the DCF77 time signal transmitter in Germany, a graphics card that has three MCX coax connectors for red, green and blue aswell as a card full of EPROMs. Sadly, I can't find any information for any of those cards online.
At least I caught the BIOS battery before it could leak and removed it, so one less thing to worry about :)
Now that seems like an exciting system to figure out! As you said, good thing you were able to catch the battery before disaster occurred! Good luck on the project and welcome to the channel!
I love these old systems. I always try to save them when I can.
Same!
Bumped into your channel and huge thank you for taking back to those computing days. You deserve a few thumbs up for explaining an old computer into a subject of conversation and joy. Thanks🫡👍👍👍👍
Thank you, glad to have you along!!! Glad you enjoyed :)
I wonder why that IDE cable was preventing the HDD from spinning up. Not installed the wrong way by any chance? .. I'd examine it and meter it out to see if maybe there's a short between a couple of pins.
I checked it again afterwards as it was suggested it could be installed incorrectly and the same result (even though I confirmed it was correct). I'll have to check the cable.
Love the nostalgia. Good memories of those days.
Awesome, glad you enjoyed!
The floppy drives run off one cable, a twist in the cable tells the machine what one is A or B. I have seen a problem with the reset switch being shorted out causing a problem with booting, So I would of unplugged that to do trouble shooting. The turbo switch would enable cache memory. That cd rom would play a music cd rom and you could plug head phones right into the cd rom and use the volume control.
Thanks for the info. In this case it was the cable to the HDD.
Great job on the diagnostics, and how odd that it should be a bad ribbon cable---fairly unusual. Then again, I did have a system that wouldn't post due to a bad phone modem---those almost never fail, but it did on that system
For sure, something so simple. I wasn't sure if I was going to get this going again or not, so I was genuinely pleased we found the problem!
The PC was probably a local PC builder. There were so many back at that time. The only way if at all to find them would do a search of PC builders in the town you purchased it in. I am sure they are no longer in business, good luck. The fact the PC doesn't have a modem means no internet yet for that builder to display their company. In my home town we had a local PC builder that did this and charged a lot more for the PCs. People would buy them because they said you would get local support.
For sure. A few have suggested this as at the time many local companies were popping up only to close down a year or so later - leaving their mark with their self branded PC's. Neat piece of history though.
Single IDE cable huh? Who would have thought? Just like some laptop won’t boot because of the defective battery. Glad it finally works. Great job!
Yes, I was floored as you could tell in my reaction lol. Very happy the system is fully functional, now time to get it all cleaned up!
My first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer. My hardware guy and I had maxed it out with (if I recall correctly) 56K of static RAM. I had also purchased the S-100 expansion box for it, and eventually got it to run North Star DOS, which required expensive hard sector 5.25” diskettes. At some point, my hardware guy, (who by this time had become my best man,) had re-written the firmware for the disk controller so that it could work with both hard and soft sector diskettes, and I started running both CP/M and N* DOS.
I also got into programming in Forth and created a diskette that allowed me to boot up with Forth as the OS. I really loved that machine. Sadly, a bad hardware design choice caused it to die a horrible death, and ultimately it was scrapped.
The problem was that the (I think) power transistor’s leads were used to support a heat sink, and every time the case was opened, it had sagged and I stupidly pulled it up each time without ever thinking about putting in some kind of support. The middle lead finally broke and (I presume) allowed it too much current or voltage to fry the circuitry. To this day I still miss that machine. The machine I have now is probably orders of magnitude better than that old Sorcerer, but I have no clue as to how I’d ever get it to boot up in Forth if I wanted to.
By the way, I am not related to Bruce Willis.
Thanks for sharing this. I love reading everyone's experiences with this old tech!
Haha, would have been cool if you were lol!
The red line on an IDE cable indicates pin 1, which is USUALLY the top left pin. Before the cables came keyed it was the easiest way to tell.
Yes. I confirmed after that it was in fact Installed correctly and is a bad cable. The new one is working without an issue.
This was my first PC that i inherited from a relative as he upgraded, around 1997-98 ... amazing. Oh.. and ... the turbo button didnt do crap back then either... haha! I just remember it lighting the diode... well good video bro! Subscribed!
Awesome - glad to have you onboard! Get ready for the fun! HAHA! Great info on the turbo button - saves me some future trouble. Thanks again!
Turbo is actually the computer's standard speed, the one stated on the processor and in the advert you saw before you bought it. If you turn turbo off, it's a slower speed for the sake of compatibility with some software (particularly games) which relied on an older processor's slower clock speed.
This was a fun find. Thank you for sharing this.
No problem!! Glad you enjoyed and thanks for watching!!
Oldest PC i recently obtained (which the case is being used for a sleeper build) is a pentium II system with the slot-2 cpu type. Is my second system with ISA slots, first one being a save from being tossed.
Amazing!!! Another system saved. What hardware did you install for the sleeper?
Wow, such a great video. Had one of these computer in the mid 90s. Would spend hours and hours daily playing with Win 3.1, Solitary, and shareware games. Still have a few old computers in the garage, and going to give it a round or two of dusting it up and turning it back on.
That's great!! Good luck getting it back up and running and bringing back those memories :)
The horizontal pc cases were and still are beautiful ❤
Absolutely. I think SilverStone still makes desktop form factor cases for newer systems. There is just something about the look :)
That Teac HDD is rare itself, even moreso to have one that still works, as these weren't exactly known to be reliable (which destroyed their reputation and caused them to leave the HDD market)
Thanks for letting me know that, I had no idea. To be honest, I do not remember seeing many TEAC drives around outside of the 5.25 drives so that makes a lot of sense. Thanks again!
We had that same computer model in our lounge in the early 90s. It had no internet access. Tenants used it for Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. You KNOW you're old if you can still remember the keyboard template for Word Perfect. Let's get freaky and merge. 😅
Bahahahahaha yes I am that old lol. However I would say I was quite young when I saw keyboards with the templates taped all over them - often ripped with some hand written text haha!
IV had that exact thing happen with an ide cable with an old 486 system I bought. Swapped out the cable and it was fine
I've had them break inside the cable before, a simple swap out fixes them. That said, I never recall them preventing the machine from booting.
I absolutely owned and built, rebuilt, and expanded computers like that. It is a beauty!
That's awesome and yes I agree - going to be fun restoring it.
AAARGHHH.....I got wet Eyes watching this Video. It Reminds me of the "Good old Days" building these Computers.......*sigh*
Wonderful......
I'm so happy you enjoyed! That's what this is all about :)
This looks like a system we used in the office of the Theater I worked for. It collected all register totals and stuff. This was in the early 1990s.
It's a pretty neat system.
Immediately spotted the LU-005 CD-ROM drive! I wish I did not sell mine like... 30 years ago :)
Haha 30 years, holy! Yup, that's the cdrom. Going to be testing things out in the restoration video.
In 1995-96 I worked for a non-profit that often received donations of PCs. Many were late 80s/early90s PCs and back then of course a 3-4 year old PC was basically considered obsolete. Some were name brand, many many clones.
I basically did what you are doing in the video, except with a few hundred PCs at a time. I would check them over, clean them up, and then we would sell them, usually for $200 and the proceeds went to the IT department of the non-profit.
Of course a lot of these PCs were despite being not that old at the time, not really salvageable or useful --- so before sending them to the recycler I would strip them for parts. My on hand "spares" area of the equipment room sort of got out of control. :) The good news was though, generally if we had a failure of a PC in the office, I could repair it from parts on-hand without having to spend any money. As a non-profit we were always strapped for cash.
This brings back memories of an "exciting" part of my life where I still considered computing "fun". Thank you for making this video!
No problem, thanks for sharing your experience... I love reading these and thanks for watching!
What is the function of these seven-segment displays, used on the front of PC cabinets from the 90s?
Usually to show the CPU set speed. The display either had jumpers on the back to set the speed for looks, or the turbo button would trigger a change of connected.