Do you know old computers?

Redundo

And i mean really old computers!

I'm a 3rd Year engineer at WIT and two of us have been given a year long project to get an old Co-Ordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) up and running. Now so far as we know the hardware is in perfect functioning order. But.... The PC that the CMM outputs its readings to is so old it looks like it was carved out of rock, and it's not working. We really must get this PC up and running to access the software on the HDD in order to operate our CMM.

The PC is an IBM Personal System 2 - Model 30 (circa 1990) - told you it was old!
The PC only has MS-DOS (not sure what version), it's pre Windows 3.1
It won't boot-up from the HDD and won't accept a boot disk possibly due to a bad floppy drive
The HDD has the defunct ESDI interface so can't be plugged directly into a modern computer
The original software is old and unavailable online, but a 3rd party equivalent could cost several hundred euro, so getting our hands on the original software is vital.

What i really need is just some background information as no-one seems to know much about this type of computer. Even Google is coming up dry for me!

What i need to know is.....

• Can an ESDI connection be adapted for use with regular IDE/SCSI connections, either via cable or an add-on board? And would that allow us to read the HDD off a computer that will boot-up?
• Can DOS programs be transferred off the old HDD to a new one or would i still need to get my hands on a Install.exe file?
• Would i be better off trying to boot the IBM PC through a working floppy drive?

We've been working on this project for 3 weeks already and are still firmly stuck at square 1. Any information you have about this type of computer would really help, no matter if you think it's relevant or not. Thanks for your consideration guys.

Anti

Right i might be able to help you here. There is a small pc shop opposite the tower hotel in waterford, next to the jade chinese. or a few doors down. Cant remember the name. But i know they have a load of old stuff. Might be worth calling into them.

Ghost Train

heres some esdi isa pc cards, with a 386 or 486 you could presumably access the hard drive

http://cgi.ebay.ie/16-Bit-ISA-Western-Digital-ESDI-Hard-Drive-PC-Card_W0QQitemZ250157575472QQihZ015QQcategoryZ4193QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.ie/COMPAQ-ESDI-CONTROLLER-ISA-CARD_W0QQitemZ300148845175QQihZ020QQcategoryZ90719QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

edit:
I'd guess best chance is probably to try and get the ibm working with a floppy drive if you can
what type of floppy drive interface is it? any chance its compatible with some more modern floppy drives
here's ftp with ibm ref disks, the two files related to the model 30 are 30start.exe (for 8086) and mod30286.exe (for the 286)
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/ftp/mirrors/ps2supersite.homedns.org/pccbbs/refdisks/

zilog_jones

IIRC PS/2 floppy drives have different connectors to the rest of the world. My friend used to have a Model 55 SX and I told him to keep the floppy drive for this reason (the PC was pretty useless besides that), but I bet you he didn't!

I have my old 386DX in the cupboard, but I'm pretty sure it has one of them newfangled ATA hard disk controllers (things changed a lot by 1992 ).

This PS/2 newsgroup is still surprisingly active - maybe you'll get help from there.

SeanW

This might not be much help much, but have a look on Google Products for some of the things you may need - like if you want to replace your machine's floppy drive there are some 3.5 and 5.25 drives for the PS/2 on there. Most of those are on Ebay.

Good luck!

Redundo

Thanks for the help guys. Unfortunately the Floppy drive uses a unique connector just like the HDD. It was all part of IBM's effort to regain PC dominance at the time, which backfired spectacularly and ended up ruining IBM's position as leader of the mainstream PC market.

See all the useless crap i've learned already thanks to this project?


I've been looking at some of the esdi isa pc cards on eBay right enough, but most are sent 'as is' without any kind of driver.

I would dearly love to scrap the whole damn thing, my geeky interest in the old pile of junk drained away as quickly as my frustration rose! Unfortunately the rarity of the software on the disk makes the damn thing essential to our project.

zilog_jones

Is it booting up at all? It should be displaying something if it can't find any OS. Is there any activity coming from the hard disk? Does it sound like it's spinning or anything (I can imagine it'd be hella loud like my old 80MB disk)?

astrofool

I'd look at it more of a problem of getting the data off the disk (or finding another machine which may have the data). Have you been in touch directly with the manufacturers of the device? You could then use a later machine (386/486) to connect the device to, and just use the software on that + whatever version of MS-DOS it requires.

You could also probably write the software yourself to do it, or at least get some basic app up and running. Does it use a serial/parallel port?

Anti

Have you tried the pc shop i said ?

zilog_jones

astrofool wrote: »

You could then use a later machine (386/486) to connect the device to, and just use the software on that + whatever version of MS-DOS it requires.

A 386 or 486 wouldn't be much help because they'd generally use ATA hard disks, not ESDI, unless he gets a separate controller card.

_CreeD_

"Can DOS programs be transferred off the old HDD to a new one or would i still need to get my hands on a Install.exe file?"

Yup, make sure the partition you put it on is marked active, formatted to FAT16 and you just need to SYS the new drive from a bootdisk with the same version of DOS (The command was just "SYS C" (or whatever drive letter))

Capt'n Midnight

ESDI , I always get mixed up between MFM / RLL - the point being that you
need a matching controller.

Just to confirm the HDD has TWO data cables one is a floppy drive type cable and the other is slightly smaller ? And they all have a Molex power cable
And the connector connects on the board directly , no pins.

double check the HDD as any of those ( 286 IBM's ) I looked in had a IDE drive with a SINGLE wider cable that includes the the 5 and 12 volts in it ,. it's not quite as wide as a 50pin SCSI cable, the drive did not have a separate Molex power cable

If it's an 8086 then you are back to MFM/RLL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST506



By the way did you try downloading the system config disk from the first link you posted to see if that would get you in, the system may have forgotten the drive parameters !

dazberry

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

ESDI , I always get mixed up between MFM / RLL - the point being that you
need a matching controller.

MFM and RLL were only encoding standards used on hard disks, AFAIR they were still using the Seagate ST506 interface.

Redundo wrote:

The PC is an IBM Personal System 2 - Model 30 (circa 1990) - told you it was old!
The PC only has MS-DOS (not sure what version), it's pre Windows 3.1

Could I just point out that when I started in WIT (formally WRTC) back in 1990, that machine would have been better than any other desktop PC in the college. [joking]Show some respect[/joking].

D.

dazberry

Redundo wrote: »

Thanks for the help guys. Unfortunately the Floppy drive uses a unique connector just like the HDD. It was all part of IBM's effort to regain PC dominance at the time, which backfired spectacularly and ended up ruining IBM's position as leader of the mainstream PC market.

Although the PS2 (imagine how many people would think I was talking about a Playstation ) did diverge from a number of standards - notably over the cloning of the ISA bus architecture, it did introduce the almost legacy PS2 style mouse and keyboard connectors. I would be surprised if they did actually screw with the FDD interface (although they did add 2.88MB FDDs support). There were 2 FDD interfaces at the drive, one from the 5.25" era and one from the 3.5".

Redundo wrote: »

I've been looking at some of the esdi isa pc cards on eBay right enough, but most are sent 'as is' without any kind of driver.

Here's the good news, there were no drivers for ESDI. The BIOS slotted in at a specific address and provided a set of services to DOS on the int 13h interrupt. DOS calls on int 21h just routed thru' the BIOS. Drivers only became an issue for performance enhancements initially on SCSI drives, and subsequently on Win 3.11 (direct disk access - if you didn't turn it on - it still worked). Once the DOS extenders (Win 3.x) went into protected mode - that's when the real penalty was experienced in switching back (80286) to call realmode BIOS or re-entrancy (80386) when things started to properly multitask.

D.

SouperComputer

MFM and RLL were only encoding standards used on hard disks, AFAIR they were still using the Seagate ST506 interface

If you mix them you can loose data though!

If you can't get the computer to boot, then all you need is the correct controller card and a computer with ISA. IIRC even some socket A boards came with ISA slots, certainly P1, PII and most PIII mobos (and AMD equivilants) will have ISA slots. The only other thing you might need to worry about is IRQ's

As mentioned above, drivers aren't needed, the controller should have its own BIOS. Might be a good idea to crack it open and post some pics. Perhaps the controller card and or HD was changed at some stage.

Be sure to persevere with this. This excercise will probably net you some serious cash at some stage in the future. Not a lot of people understand how to make these older computers "tick" and there are still a lot of them around in mission-critical situations. For some reason I have an unhealthy obsession with older hardware. I'm learning to program an Altair 8800 right now and hope to build an Apple I replica in the next few months.

Have a chat with Bryan or Darren at Electronic Recycling in Finglas (01) 864 0806, they might have something that is in the 286/386/486 realm which might be a bit easier to massage into action as an interim measure before bringing the software to somthing more modern.

Depending on the access to hardware that the software needs, dosbox or bochs would be a neat way to get it all up and running.

Just be careful not to mix drives and controllers!!!!

Redundo

The HDD does spin up, and yes it is pretty loud, then the computer will beep at me a couple of times and display "Disk Boot Failure" any key i press results in a restart with the exact same "Disk Boot Failure" message until i get fed up and switch it off.

At the moment i think finding a replacement FDD and DOS boot disk is the best chance at getting the thing up and running. However as they are proprietary to this IBM design too, they are just as hard to come by.

I haven't gotten a chance to visit the computer shop in town yet, but it is on my list of things to do.

The HDD looks something like this:

SouperComputer

TBH the boot disk failure worries me. It may be the HD itself.

Try to nab some photos of the controller card and the HD and get the models and S/N's

Does the controller's BIOS appear when you boot up? YOu should have some options to initialise (Format) the disk from the contorlles BIOS, not that you want to, but it may help ascertain what is wrong. Hopefully its the controller rather than the drive that is dead.

Also these drives are very sensitve to orientation and temperature. Eg if you were to format it on its side and try to use it when its horizontal, it will probably ask you to reinitialise as the parition table cannot be read properly.

Another way to access it is to get you mits on an ISA SCSI card and an old SCSI drive. Electronic recycling may have one about. IIRC there was an ISA sound card once upon a time that had an IDE interface chip and connector on it, might be worth looking at that option too.

Heres a 50pin SCSI card: http://cgi.ebay.ie/WYSE-Sphinx-Multi-I-O-ISA-Adapter-Card-P-N-990647-02_W0QQitemZ150170931076QQihZ005QQcategoryZ58361QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem

50pin drives are not all that hard to come across. Shame im not in Ireland, I could take one of the 50pin drives I have here and make it bootable with DOS.

Capt'n Midnight

Be VERY careful when using a different controller.

dazberry wrote: »

MFM and RLL were only encoding standards used on hard disks, AFAIR they were still using the Seagate ST506 interface.

MFM used 17 sectors and RLL used 26 sectors
IIRC you could put an MFM drive on an RLL controller and reformat to get more space, scary monsters cos it's about the same as punching an extra hole in a 720KB floppy to make a 1.44MB one.

If the drive is that old then two things to try
* it may be "stiction" due to loss of lubricant, very gentle taping may loosen it up, and by gentle I used to use vibrations from a second drive placed on top.
* old drives did not have a voice coil, so the stepper motor was only accurate at the temperature the drive was originally used at

spinrite would be the software to use to test a pre-IDE drive

do you have the drive model or even the name ?

I've a few ISA controllers somewhere, but they are 16 bit ISA and I can't remember if they are RLL/MFM or ESDI since the 34 way and 20 way connectors are common to all.

zilog_jones

dazberry wrote: »

I would be surprised if they did actually screw with the FDD interface (although they did add 2.88MB FDDs support). There were 2 FDD interfaces at the drive, one from the 5.25" era and one from the 3.5"./QUOTE]
I'm pretty sure they used a non-standard floppy connector with integrated power.

IIRC even some socket A boards came with ISA slots, certainly P1, PII and most PIII mobos (and AMD equivilants) will have ISA slots.

Yeah, a lot of early Socket A and many Slot 1 and Socket 370 (PIII) full ATX motherboards (not micro-ATX) have at least 1 ISA slot.

Does the controller's BIOS appear when you boot up? YOu should have some options to initialise (Format) the disk from the contorlles BIOS, not that you want to, but it may help ascertain what is wrong. Hopefully its the controller rather than the drive that is dead.

From my experience with a later PS/2, you can do feck all with the BIOS unless you have some particular floppies. The disk images are easily available on the interwebs, but he has to get a functional floppy drive first :rolleyes: Maybe the heads just need cleaning or the drive belt has snapped (if there is one in older 3.5" drives? I know they don't these days)?

niallb

Wow, there's a few of us here been around a while then!

You need to keep the drive and controller together - they are a pair.
Sounds like the machine is fine, just has completely forgotten what kind of disk it has
and where it is. If you change the drive or controller on this, you'll end up using an
old copy of dos debug to try to manually change the drive's address...

All the batteries in the machine are bound to be dead at this stage, but if the screen comes on and it tries to boot, you should get there. The PS2 floppies are very different
to normal ones - I'd forgotten they had the power lead built into the cable, z_j.
I think they were a little closer to normal on the 286 models though.
I had a series 50 or so, which used an MCA bus.
At least yours has ISA in it, and there's some hope finding 8 bit cards.

You don't need to run this PC, you just need to copy the data off it.
Copy it to floppy or transfer it via serial cable to something newer.
A DOS boot disk with interlnk and intersrv is something you should acquire two copies of, as well as a null modem cable.

Your first step needs to be to download the reference disk for your model.
I think there's a link further back in the thread. This is one of the disks you'll need. It should let you see if the drive is still there.
There'll be a number on the drive - make sure you know it when you boot up.
If you get fond of the machine, I think I've some memory around that'd work in it, :-)

Good luck with it. I'm going to dream of long ago sleepless nights :-)
NiallB

Ghost Train

Acording to this the ps/2 model 30 was sold without a hard disk, the hard disk was like an optional extra. So the fact that it's not booting, probably just means that there was never an os on the hard disk and the os always booted from the floppy. So wouldn't be too suspicious of the hard disk without trying to read it with another system or getting the machine to boot from a floppy

btw whats wrong with the floppy drive... is it making any noise... have you tried opening it up and cleaning any dust from inside... have you tried it with new boot disks created in another machine... it is a 3.5" diskette drive?

edit: I actually have an old isa soundcard with an ide interface on it, like SouperComputer mentioned, should be able to put it in an old machine and see if it's possible to boot a hard disk from it.

SouperComputer

From my experience with a later PS/2, you can do feck all with the BIOS unless you have some particular floppies.

You misread my post, I was refering to the disk controller's BIOS, not the motherboard's.

Thats a pretty valid point eolhc that it may not have an OS on the HD and may just have booted from a floppy.

According to this link the floppy drive used in his 30 is a mitsubishi MF355C. You probably dont want to know how much they are on ebay

You might be able to get a compatible floppy drive cheap enough of electronic recycling.

Maybe there is an ISA floppy controller about?

Ghost Train

Okay, tried the sound card, installed it in an old pentium 233mhz machine and after a bit of messing about it does detect an ide drive plugged into the card and tries to boot from it, with no need for drivers. I will try and install some version of dos on an old hard disk later and let you know how/if it works, i think it should work. So Redundo your welcome to this card if you want it, if you pm me your contact details i can send it to you, if you think you need the harddrive (2gb or maybe a 80mb if i can find it) or even the pc you can have them, but you'd need to collect them(from dublin)

the bios in the machine i have seems to deal automatically with setting up the isa cards and with auto detecting hard drives on the system. I'm not sure how the older machine you have would manage the card/hard disk setup or what size hard disk it would be able to cope with, can you get into a bios setup screen when you try to boot the machine?


edit: some more links for you
lots of (very)technical manuals
more ps/2 files, also what looks like a good hardware manual

Redundo

Some of you were asking about the FDD. Well we have tried already to get it going with a Dos boot disk, but the drive never made a sound and the led never lit up to say it was even trying to read the disk. The mouth of the drive was all gunked up with dust, and i mean a lot of gunk. We scraped so much out of it that it makes me doubt the FDD was used as the primary boot up - I think the OS was on the HDD. All this makes me think the FDD is in even worse state then the HDD. But i will try giving it a proper clean-out.

eolhc is quite right saying the HDD was an optional extra on the model 30 due to extra expense, but i think in this case the HDD is original and had some version of DOS as it's OS. And keep those parts somewhere safe for the time being, i may be making a trip collect them if i can't get any more headway!


Just as an aside, i got a quote back from Mitutoyo today (the CMM maker) about replacing the original software with new. Six and a half thousand was the price i got! Now WIT might be willing to fork over a couple hundred tops, but with the likes of this i think they'd prefer to pay scrappage fees!

astrofool

You should already have a license for the software, surely they should be able to send you the software if they have it. They wouldn't have the invoice for this machine by chance anywhere?

Those sound cards with IDE connectors were originally used for CD-ROM's which they came packaged with, had one myself (Creative).

zilog_jones

And AFAIK they weren't proper ATA/IDE standard stuff either, if it's a Creative SB16 or something similar that you're talking about. They'd only work with certain specific CD-ROM drives.

You misread my post, I was refering to the disk controller's BIOS, not the motherboard's.

I was refering to either. On the PS/2 I used, without the floppies it'd either boot the OS (if it found one) or come up with some error code. You couldn't do anything else at all.

Sounds like the machine is fine, just has completely forgotten what kind of disk it has and where it is.

Oh yeah, forgot about the battery! Hopefully it is just that. And if it's like the later PS/2s it uses one of those stupid Dallas RTC chips with integrated battery, which may be very hard/impossible to find a replacement.

Ghost Train

astrofool wrote: »

Those sound cards with IDE connectors were originally used for CD-ROM's which they came packaged with, had one myself (Creative).

zilog_jones wrote: »

And AFAIK they weren't proper ATA/IDE standard stuff either, if it's a Creative SB16 or something similar that you're talking about. They'd only work with certain specific CD-ROM drives.

Just to follow up

Yeah got the sound card with a cd-rom drive for an IBM PS/1 386. The model is from aztech, was SB16 compatible, so probably a copy of or something similar to the creative one.

Had to change some of the bios settings, motherboard ide controller irq settings, change the hard disk read mode to 16bit

Had windows 3.1 on an old disk and it booted up fine (man does windows 3.1 look bad), also worked in windows millenium. Installed dos 6.11 on the disk and again works grand through the sound card ide, no problem reading/writing or doing any other sort of operation, so as far as i can see it's a standard ide adapter.

just to say if it's the 8086/xt model 30 you have, that had 8-bit isa bus, so don't think it would work with this card, it would need to have 16bit bus like the 286 model 30

Redundo

I'll get some pictures of it tomorrow which should hopefully give more detail. I need the pictures anyway for the eventual report write-up, which i'm not looking forward too.

Thanks for all the help so far guys, it's been a lot more then i had right to expect.

Capt'n Midnight

does it start up with a key icon ? something like O=m ?
if so you need the disk


pics would be nice, if the pictures aren't clear model numbers off the drive and card would be nice too

and a picture of the slots beside the one the card is in , just confirm whether it's
8 bit ISA
16 bitISA
MCA :rolleyes:

trout

Just to add to the mix ... I'm pretty sure the key icon means there is a boot password set. There may be nothing wrong with the hard drive or the floppy, from a mechanical point of view. This is worth considering.

There will be a jumper on the motherboard which will clear the boot password. It's labelled PWD CLR or something similar. Have a look and see if you can spot an open jumper block with a similar label ? Don't change ANY jumpers, just check first.

Better yet ... can you post a pic of the boot screen ? There is another boot screen that indicates you must start with a reference disk or IBM boot disk. If I see the screen, I'm pretty sure it will come all back to me. :rolleyes:

We used to have these machines in work, and there may be old ones in the basement, or possibly even manuals for them.

Can't promise anything, but I will have a good look tomorrow morning and post back.

If it's not a boot password issue, then your next step is determined by the Hard Disk connection.
I'd be surprised if it's an IDE drive. It's more likely to be ESDI.

If it's an ESDI drive, I may be able to help ... I have a working 8bit XT machine with ESDI.
It should be possible to boot from your drive, or from a floppy and transfer data via serial port onto a more modern PC.

Some pictures would help a lot here.

Redundo

Pictures at last. We'll be dropping it down to the Computer shop (mentioned earlier) in the morning. After all we've got nothing to lose at this stage! And at least if it is knackered we need a tech to say so for our report.

Sorry if these pics slow things up, but i needed to keep them large enough to make out some details.

Ghost Train

Wow dusty

yeah it's the older model 30, the 8086 not the 286, so would be 8bit isa
and the floppy looks like 40pin, not the standard 34pin

zilog_jones

Looks quite a lot different from the Model 55, then again it's not a 386 among other things.

Looks like it only takes 8-bit ISA cards - what is the one in it there? Underneath that looks like a standard old-style Ni-Cd battery (the yellow barrel thing - made by Panasonic?), which are easily available from Maplin and similar places if it needs to be replaced.

It's definately not an ATA hard disk!

Looks like 30-pin SIMMs - unusual for a 286? Oh wait it's a PS/2! The 386 one I saw had 72-pins...

Judging by the top-most sticker on the power supply it was replaced in '96, which is good news for that, but probably bad news for everything else (esp. hard disk) as it suggests the machine was in regular use for 6+ years. That power switch control looks crazy

Also, get some compressed air!

Redundo

Just for infos sake, that card you can see in the bottom left of the last picture is the GPIB card used to connect the sensors of the CMM.

trout

Wow ... that's some amount of dust.

So ... is this what we know ?

The machine is an XT (8086).
It has a 720 Kb floppy. (not 1.44 or even 2.88 ... they were much later)
The floppy does not spin on start up. (I'm inferring this from previous posts).

The hard drive interface is ESDI. (not IDE/EIDE or ATA)
The hard drive spins up, and is loud. (ESDI hard drives always are)
The machine does not boot from the hard drive ... "Disk Boot Failure" error.

IBM Reference disks can be sourced, not launched - as the floppy drive appears dead.

Are these statements correct ?

Can you get any more detail of the hard drive ?

The size of the drive would be a very good indication of the type of encoding (MFM or RLL).
10 Mb or less it's most likely MFM. More than 10 Mb, it's most likely RLL.

If it was me, I would consider adding an ISA ESDI controller to a more modern machine.
You won't boot from this drive, but you may be able to access it.
You'd have to be very sure of the encoding though

Failing all that, have you considered handing the drive over to data recovery specialists ?
Maybe worth a phone call. There may be people on here who've used this type of service ?

PM me if you want to try and swap out the floppy ... I have a 1.44 Mb PS/2 you can try.

Redundo

That seems to be a good summary. I'll add that the HDD is a WDI-325Q which after a quick google-check seems to mean greater then 20mb but less then 100.

We dropped the drive into the computer shop this morning as they said there was a chance they would still be able to read it. If that fails i think we'll have one last go at getting a working floppy drive ourselves before binning it.

10-10-20

If you're unsure of the encoding, see if the HDD has a WP (write protect) jumper - if so, set it and it should prevent overwriting by the controller.

trout

edit - that's good advice on the WP jumper... if it exists, use it. The PC shop have no need to write to the drive!

If the PC shop can't read the drive, please don't bin it. You may still have options either here or via data recovery specialists ... apparently these lads can recover data from drives damaged by fire, floods, lightening etc. etc.

If you do get data off the drive, you may have fun getting the CMM controller program to run from a more modern machine. I'm curious to see how the CMM controller interacts with the device ... what drivers are involved? etc.

Do post back and let us know how you get on.

Best of luck