Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390

Tue May 15 15:38:59 CDT 2018

> On May 15, 2018, at 1:29 PM, Dave Wade via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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..
> 

Some time ago I acquired a PCI P/390 card (along with the various LIC files).  I went down the same path as you to build a P/390 system with OS/2 but I kept running into problems with OS/2 versions and supported hardware.

I finally gave up and acquired a PCI based RS/6000 that I’ll install AIX on and have an R/390.  ;-)  I haven’t had the time yet to make any progress on it.

But it’s good to know that you’ve managed to do this if I decide to go back and attempt the PC route again.

TTFN - Guy