Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

I just cleaned this trash up...it better stay that way or next time I'll just get rid of the thread.

[stj]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

it doesnt sleep, it just acts very slowly

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

I would still clean that rot off of there...

[TechGeek]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Well his keyboard is working... just need to know if he can get in/out of protected mode...

Yep...

[eccerr0r]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Well his keyboard is working... just need to know if he can get in/out of protected mode...

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

about your battery leak
the 8042 keyboard controller socket is totally fucked and the chip pins need severly cleaning.

Good catch....and 100% correct!

[stj]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

about your battery leak
the 8042 keyboard controller socket is totally fucked and the chip pins need severly cleaning.

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Cause of death: Head Crash. This was lurking on the bottom side of the top platter.

Looks like it's time for a shave!!

[TechGeek]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Tearing into the failed WD 850MB hard drive to find out what went wrong.

I'd already gotten pretty deep into the drive by this point, but what the hey. Signs of a disaster present from the moment I popped the drive open. Platters aren't supposed to have a brushed finish to them.


A closer look at the evidence.


Here's a different angle. You can see the damage better.


The covered side of the drive's PCB, seeing the light of day for the first time in more than 27 years.


Protective foam that almost didn't want to come off.


Head stack.


Cause of death: Head Crash. This was lurking on the bottom side of the top platter.


Bottom platter, top side.


Bottom platter, bottom side. Notice the brushed finish to the platters on every single platter side.


Removable spindle motor! Still looks good.


The drive chassis, stripped bare.


-----------------------------
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming...


SpinRite 6 found nothing wrong with the replacement drive.


A fresh install of DOS and now for Windows 95.


While Windows 95 didn't take too long to install, it definitely chugs on the hard drive with only 8MB of RAM to play around with. It also breaks the drivers for the Sound Blaster Vibra/16 card, and it doesn't play nice with the card's wave controller. I'm probably gonna roll it back to WfW3.11 or OS/2.

The hard drive had some old DOS installations on it, as well as an old Windows 3.1 install. For now, I've filed it all away to some temp folders and I'll sort through all of that, pick out the interesting bits that I care about, and then format the drive and start with a fresh install of DOS.

[TechGeek]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Got the 428MB drive in, and things are looking good.

Starting off with a followup to the battery corrosion. Got the corrosion neutralized with vinegar and mostly cleaned up. Looks much better.


Replacement hard drive.


Installed. Had to uninstall the PSU to get the drive cage out of the system.


And here's the PSU.


PSU manufactured April 24, 1992.


SpinRite Level 5 time against the new hard drive.


And here's how I deal with troublesome floppy diskettes:


And if that doesn't fix them, then this certainly will


I did a teardown of the failed hard drive. Coming up next.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

damn. no dice.
"Disk" is only 512MB and well within sizes of that day and era, overflows not likely?
Scandisk fixed nothing, was clean (but had some warnings).
removing trailing backslash had no effect, it still reports disk doesn't have enough space.
hmm..though windows\temp ... now this is a clue.... at least scandisk warned some stuff there...

[Uranium-235]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Yay was able to extract win95 from the failed CDRs and got a basic install on my 486dx4/75 on a 512M CF card. At 16MB RAM, don't think I'd want anything newer.

Now need to find drivers...

You know I havn't read all the way through this thread but you can get the windows 95 iso on the web for free

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

wtf, was firefox never supported on win95?

What browsers were ever supported on win95? Oh no I have to go back to Netscape?

firefox support for win98 was very sketchy also. the only version of firefox ever supported on win98 was firefox v2.0 or something.

due to the CF card, it's so quiet I can't tell this thing is madly thrashing while trying to work with the installer...

just look at the hd activity indicator led. it should work even with a cf card since the cf interface is pin compatible with ide but with a different sized connector, that is all.

(and I still can't explain why it thinks it has no disk space left, it looks like it has plenty... perhaps the win98 msvcrt.dll has unintended side effects when running on win95...)

the only thing i can think of is to just run scandisk to fix the free disk space count. sometimes the free disk space count on the drive can become focked for some reason. running scandisk fixes it.

otherwise, yes it could be some sort of integer overflow error in the dll causing improper recognition of the free space available. one other thing u can try that i found using some of my google-fu is to try cleaning up the windows\temp folder. see if it fixes that problem.

i also found a thread on bugzilla that shows this problem in the v2.0 branch of firefox.
Bugzilla - 385333 - Insufficient disk space error when there is sufficient disk space
so it seems to be some kind of a problem with the way the installation path is specified. try entering it manually without the trailing backslash at the end of the path.

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

I don't think I've ever seen a 2.88MB floppy drive. I think I've seen a 2.88MB disk once with its weird ED logo, but not the drive.

I think I've seen a superdisk (LS120) drive before, but no media...

Both I think are pretty much unobtanium at least cheaply, nowadays.

I have a couple vintage IBM PS/2's with 2.88mb floppy drives in them and a couple of the disks floating around. LS120's used to be a dime a dozen, I haven't looked for them in a long time....I have a few in the pile somewhere and a bunch of disks for them.... I've always made due with 1.44mb.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

I don't think I've ever seen a 2.88MB floppy drive. I think I've seen a 2.88MB disk once with its weird ED logo, but not the drive.

I think I've seen a superdisk (LS120) drive before, but no media...

Both I think are pretty much unobtanium at least cheaply, nowadays.

[TechGeek]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

dont those need special floppies with better quality coatings?

btw, try installing FreeDos and OS² Warp on it!
http://www.freedos.org/
https://winworldpc.com/product/os-2-.../os-2-warp-452

You can force-format 1.44MB diskettes to 2.88MB. Probably a good idea to hit 'em with a tape eraser beforehand to kill the sectoring.


Hadn't thought about OS/2. I've thought about FreeDOS, but not sure whether I'd like to use it on this system. Looking to keep everything as close to period-correct when and where I can. (When possible. I don't readily have room for a CRT monitor in any of the locations that I can see myself using the computer on a regular basis, but I'd use one if I had the room.

[stj]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

dont those need special floppies with better quality coatings?

btw, try installing FreeDos and OS² Warp on it!
http://www.freedos.org/
https://winworldpc.com/product/os-2-.../os-2-warp-452

[TechGeek]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

Not much progress on the system over the past week+, again, due to waiting on that hard disk. As mentioned earlier, not only did Ontrack Disk Manager refuse to install on the system due to the bugged BIOS, but the 850MB drive failed Monday evening at about 6PM with a click-of-death, indicating a failure to self-calibrate.

Here's the errors that I was getting from Ontrack Disk Manager:
(Normal Mode)


(Advanced Mode)


In the meantime, I managed to get a RAM drive set up, as well as EMS/XMS (from my MS-DOS 6.22 diskette). I downloaded a demo and copied it to a pair of floppy diskettes, which I can then copy into the RAM drive. From that, I can start the demo. All with about 3.5MB free of the 8MB of RAM that it has. That includes the 1MB of EMS RAM that it requires for sound and the 577K of conventional (holy yikes) RAM that it requires.

Temporary setup.


Demo running. Using the SoundBlaster Vibra/16's SB Pro emulation for high quality stereo audio.


As soon as I get a working (and compatible!) hard disk in there, things are going to progress rapidly.

(P.S.: Does anyone know of a source or have any 2.88MB floppy drives that aren't from an IBM anything and don't cost a small fortune?)

[stj]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

i had a floppy once, booted into a browser!!!
it was a demo of VXWORKS embeded o.s.

[Topcat]

Re: Gateway 80486-DX2/50 Revival

(and I still can't explain why it thinks it has no disk space left, it looks like it has plenty... perhaps the win98 msvcrt.dll has unintended side effects when running on win95...)

I had that happen with an installer once with Win2k.....I don't remember what the cure was....but I recall the confusion when I saw the error message showing the free space versus what the program needed.....

On a side note....LOL'ing at when a web browser only used 18MB of disk space!!