13 Jun
2006
13 Jun
'06
7:13 p.m.
John D. Reeve wrote:
Hello All. I've recently acquired a Compaq
Portable III (286, cool gas plasma display) and am having some problems with the hard
drive. After powering up, the system says to insert a diagnostic disk in drive A. If I
choose "Resume" by hitting the F1 key, it will boot PC-DOS just fine from the
floppy drive (1.2 MB, 5.25") although it complains about the time and date not being
set. The system doesn't show a C drive, however, and FDISK also says there is no hard
disk. Here is my question - do I need these diagnostic disks to setup the hard drive on
this system? Or is the hard disk just dead? Does anyone have a copy of the disks?
Thanks for any help. John Reeve
The CMOS is probably dead in your machine. It uses a proprietary
battery SOLDERED to the PCB. Long term, you will want to remove
this and replace it with something newer (unless you want to
claim "factory orginal" status). I used a set of 3 NiMH AAA
cells behind a diode (because I had a few hundred of them
at the time :> )
The case disassembles easily -- but be careful of those LONGGGGG
capscrews and any lockwashers down at the bottom.
Once the back skin is off, there are several obvious screws holding
the main board in place. Plus, a shield over the lower portion
of the board. The trickiest part is the little "jumper board" (?)
that connects the memory board to the main board (lower left corner
IIRC).
Disconnect all of the cables for floppy, hard drive, serial port
connection, display adapter, etc. The battery should remove pretty
easily with a couple of thruhole solder connections (dispose
of responsibly). Your machine may or may not have a plastic
"clip" that wraps around the batter. Keep it as it is handy
for securing a new battery assembly to the board!
I soldered a little two pin pigtail to the board to mate with
the two pin connector on my 3cell battery packs -- overkill as
I haven't had to replace it since! :>
You need to download the SETUP, INSPECT, TEST set of floppies
from the Compaq web site (archive). If push comes to
shove,
I *might* have the images here but I don't think they are
"standard" floppies in that I am not sure they have the same
format as a regular DOS floppy (though, come to think of it,
I think I backed mine up with WinImage so they *must* be
readable).
Biggest pisser will be if your floppy drive is flakey.
I don't think you can substitute a 3.5" drive -- I don't
think they were designed with that in mind.
You can also consider hacking the BIOS ROMs to support a
different disk. I stuffed a 600M drive in my portable 3
(though have never used any significant portion of that...
I just use it as a dumb terminal to capture configuration
and diagnostic output from my PBX). Email me offlist if you
would like some help doing so...