Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390

[Dave Wade]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com>
> Sent: 15 May 2018 16:35
> To: Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com>; cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390
> 
> 
> 
> > On May 14, 2018, at 11:29 PM, Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Adam
> >> Thornton via cctalk
> >> Sent: 15 May 2018 03:03
> >> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> >> Subject: RE: Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390
> >>
> >> I Frankensteined a P/390 together out of a P/325 server and the PCI
> >> P/390 card back in the day.
> >>
> >
> > I am told the PCI card is rather choosy about which servers it will run in. The
> system came with most of a P330 as well, but no case.
> 
> 
> It is pretty picky.  It did not run in a whitebox PC I had at the time, but the PC
> Server 325 was close enough to its expected host that it was happy.  I would
> guess that any of the IBM x86 server machines from the right general era
> would work.
> 
> That machine now lives at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, although I
> do not know if they have it available for use.
> 

OK I got a PCI P390 card in the bundle of spares but have nothing PCI server style to run it in.
Where I worked we binned loads of X330's which might have been usable...

> >
> >
> > It’s the RAID card that’s the problem, and it seems to have always been
> temperamental. Did you use RAID in your P/325?
> 
> 
> I don’t think I did.  Have you tried just putting a different (OS/2-supported)
> disk controller in and just not doing RAID?
> 

That’s, in effect, what I did. Whilst there were Microchannel IDE Controllers I have never seen one. There are no IDE interfaces on the "Planar" so every thing must be on the MCA bus.
So I bought a BusLogic BT646 SCSI card on E-Bay. I also bought an Adaptec card as a spare.  I think I struck lucky with the BT646. It is a simple SCSI/2 card, no raid but it does have a BIOS with support for two bootable drives and a >4GB drive option.
OS/2 has drivers for it so it works out of the box. The OS/2 boot disks find the drive and install the proper drivers. 
To compensate for the slower "narrow" drives I bought a SCSI2SD card that puts an SD card on the bus. OS/2 just sees it as a up two four drives depending on how I configure it. At present I have two 4gb drives. The card in it is 32gb so I can add 2 x 12gb drives or 1 x 24gb or some other mix. The CD ROM sites on the same bus. I haven't tried the tape drive yet..

> >
> >>
> >> I used mine to run VM/CMS and Linux (under VM) quite well.
> >>
> >
> > I was thinking of trying Linux. I assume you ran Debian?
> 
> 
> Indeed I did, although also SLES.  I assume you found my NASPA article on
> Debian on 390 from 2004?
> 

I think that’s the one...


> Adam
> 
>