20 Aug
2006
20 Aug
'06
6:07 p.m.
jim stephens wrote:
I thought the Portable III was strictly a 286. The "Portable 386"
was it's lookalike 386 cousin?
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
I just unpacked one that had been stored in a reasonable warehouse
environment,
this week, and when I pulled off the keyboard, the insulation sheathing
totally disintegrated.
This is not A Good Thing.
How do
you know the keyboard is "incompletely connected"?
I assume that those "few threads" are actually capable of
carrying current?
No, I mean, the cable is frayed and wires are open, visible and in
most places
partially or totally cut. As in, the cable is barely physically intact. I think they tried some sort of plastic to make the
cable retain the
curl, and it was not very good.
I have not tested the keyboard, the later suggestion of trying another
standard at is a good one.
This is pretty much an AT with a 30 or so entry HD table, instead of
just the AT's 15 entry table in the disk extension.
As such, you need an AT setup disk to set the cmos if it is dead. It
should
boot and run either the compaq one, or the standard AT one. If you dont
need > 15 in the drive type, the standard AT will work. A lot of these
had drive type 2, which IIRC is a 20mb.
Ah, I hadn't realized anything other than the Compaq setup/test/install
disk worked!
Another thing that concerns me is that you need to say
whether you
see floppy activity, either constant (bad ps) or none at all after
you boot up. You should see a floppy seek if you have a floppy
installed, just like an ordinary AT would do.
<snip>
I *think* the drive door must be closed for it to seek (?).
I.e. insert floppy and PUSH the "button" so it stays IN
(press again to release/eject)
I have it
connected to AC, so unless it needs the battery to boot
(*mumble* fricking Mac Portable*mumble*), it shouldn't be that ...
yes, it needs to have cmos setup program booted from floppy if (since
the battery will be) is dead.
Please let me know what you find. The form factor
is fascinating, so I
would love to get it running again.
They are nice 286 or 386 machines, consume much less than preserving the
equivalent AT pile.