IBM PC/AT Model 5170: Saved from the trash 🔥

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video another episode of pc archaeology gonna be taking a look at this ibm 5170 this computer was donated by viewer and patron justin from seattle he happened to be driving through portland and said he had some stuff to give me so i met up with him and picked it up there are some other things besides this machine which we'll be taking a look at probably on the second channel at some point before i get started i just want to mention one other thing i wasn't intending to make a video on this machine at least not at this point things had gotten really busy for me at work and i just didn't have a chance to work on the video that i actually wanted to release so hopefully that one will come out in the near future anyhow without further ado let's get right to it [Music] before i talk about this machine i want to talk about this it's a little bit of candy that justin brought me i think he said he got it at cost plus world market up in seattle and there's two versions of harrybo that i have never seen so i figured let me cut these open and just give them a very quick taste test i know i'd always mentioned that the candy reviews would be on the second channel but i figured i'd as well just do these very quickly right here so this first one very interesting they're like little spools and i'm not quite sure the way you're supposed to eat them i suppose like this break off a piece oh yeah that's good it's a very tart taste this sort of reminds me of the hairy bow that package that had the varieties of haribo from around the world in it and this stuff tastes maybe like the stuff you get from spain they were extruded little tubes so i guess this is extruded in a different way in this round wheel thing but i gotta say i really like it and the next one pinky and lily these look like very pink and purple colored and then they have that white stuff on the back the milk candy whatever it is and the shapes are owls really cute maybe these are kids characters from a cartoon or a book or something what do i think about pinky and lily it's okay it's pretty good i'd definitely eat all these if i had low blood sugar it's just sort of sweet and the the white sort of milky part in the back is good good little combo flavors are weird it's kind of flowery not quite sure i definitely prefer these extruded wheels here nice tart tart taste anyhow okay enough of the candy reviews thank you justin for bringing these for me all right so the ibm 5170 if you know my lab i actually have one and it is right there it's always where it sits on top of that keyboard drawer i picked up this machine a number of years ago from a local person i think i paid ten dollars for it but it had been dropped so there's a big cracker hole in the side of the front bezel the top metal cover was all dented up i had to kind of hammer it back into shape i think some of the standoffs on the front panel were broken off as well but i epoxied those back on but the machine didn't even have the original motherboard and it had a 3d6 sx which had severe battery leakage i think there was a little bit of rust inside anyways there was a reason why this thing was so cheap it was because it was definitely not an original machine i think it worked or i can't remember it even worked or not but anyways i had to do a lot of work on that thing to get it even to the shape it's in now but it has a 286 in there but it's not the original motherboard and of course that hole in the side isn't the end of the world but it definitely kind of bothers me but this machine it looks to be in pretty good shape i mean i won't know until i clean it up because it's pretty dirty overall the whole case is really dirty it's got the original five and a quarter inch disk drive 1.2 megabyte nothing else installed i figure i will be taking this machine and the one i hover over there and making one good machine between the two of them and that means i can take the badge off of that machine and stick it on here for instance because at the minimum this front bezel is in better shape than that thing let's take a quick look at the rest of this machine what justin told me is this machine came from i think a hoarder's house and it was up inside the garage or no it was up in the attic so this right here on the side i have no idea if this is something that's going to come off looks like there might be rust here but this also just could be gunk that does clean off so i'll need to take this machine and give it a thorough cleaning but as usual we have the nice chunky power switch there i have no idea about the operational status of this machine does it work does it not work i don't know does have the rear badge for the 5170 got a few scratches and scuffs but the plates on here one of the screws is missing and looking at the cards that are installed in here it looks like we have a ega card of some kind there's a hole for dip switches network card we have a coax of some kind could be token ring maybe or is this going to be ethernet we have a serial and a parallel port and a ripped barcode on the back on the side of the case ah i don't know it's okay some of this stuff feels like it's surface and it should come off and the top of the machine it's dirty but hopefully this stuff like this is from monitors hopefully this stuff comes off that might be painted scratched off i have no clue okay let's get the cover off so this has the original screws means you need to use these nut drivers here well at least it has four of the original screws i'm not too concerned and let's lift the hood what do we got inside how bad is it okay i see the battery right off the bat and it is not leaked or hasn't leaked at least not from first glance okay so the ibm 5170 first off the battery oh look it's not even connected and it hasn't leaked that is amazing it's a bit crusty that's really dirty that velcro hook and loop sorry hook and loop that's good it hasn't leaked though because that can destroy everything now i was about to say rather disappointingly there is no hard drive in this machine because the hard drive controller here has the cable that would have gone to the hard drive here and not connected to anything but there is a hard card in this machine right here look at that hard card and the hard card doesn't appear to be actually installed with a screw but there it is the plus hard card 20. now i found that these are incredibly unreliable devices and i think i have one of these once that i found that actually worked but almost always this thing totally these things are always totally dead so i'm gonna anticipate that that's gonna be the case for this machine let's grab the nut driver here and i'll take out these screws on these various adapter cards here so as i remove these screws i am pleased to report and it's going to be hard to see in the camera but this is the original ibm motherboard in here so this motherboard is in good shape and works that means that between this machine and my other machine i should hopefully have a working 5170 with the original motherboard now it goes without saying this motherboard might be bad but if i recall most of the components on here are pretty standard so if anything is bad perhaps i can fix it and ibm was so good as to publish the schematics for all their machines for these early ones that is so that is available okay starting at the back what do we got here here is a serial parallel board i assume this is an original ibm part i don't see i mean i don't know this barcode looks very ibm like and looking at the back we have another barcode and whatever this is i don't know if that's the ibm stuff i don't see ibm written on here the date code on the ics on this are from 1986 i'll compare that to what's on the motherboard in a second that is next card is this network card and definitely not sure if this is just regular ethernet or is this token ring have any coax networking equipment anymore and there's not even a ui on there so there's not even a way to use one of those little transceiver modules all right next card is the video card which i think is an ega card and this very much looks like an original ibm card or if it's not it's a clone so it has a connector here for the ram expansion that you would get for this to bump it up to what 256k of ram something like that and then there's this connector here which is like the feature connector and i think that this connector which is often on many of the clone ega cards is what connects to these two rca jacks that are on the back here that these aren't normally connected unless you have something plugged into here which might convert the video signal into composite for instance and then output at one of these and in fact comparing it to the serial card definitely looks very similar from a manufacturing perspective in fact this one says comp right here and it says that right there as well probably for components and from a ram capacity on the stock ega card now i've never actually had the ibm card and i'm not haven't looked it up on the internet yet but i see 4416 chips here which is two of these is 16k which would mean that this is 64k of onboard memory and a whole bunch of the ics say ibm corp on them so definitely an ibm ega card and the last card has the hard drive led connected to it still i'm assuming by the fact that there's a ribbon cable left in here that would have originally gone to the mfm hard drive that was in here so this obviously had a regular hard drive that must have died and they put that hard card in there and they just left this in and this would be a 16-bit card and it is indeed i'm not sure if this is an ibm card or not but probably is western digital on these chips and 1983 fixed disk floppy diskette but it has similar looking barcode to the serial parallel card right there so yeah figuring that this is ibm probably came with this machine originally in 1983. isn't that the year that the ibm 5170 came out or was it 1982 so there is the original ibm 5170 motherboard if i move these cables you'll just get a glance at the ceramic package of the 286 chip here but this metal plate is something that's a dead giveaway for ibm's motherboards of course this also has chips here the bios chips are labeled ibm right on them so it's not a clone or if it is it's using the original chips and i really do have to say other than this thing being a little bit dusty the inside of the case is in really good shape the fact that the battery didn't leak and destroy things means that this thing should be easily cleanable and be made to be a really good 5170 at least this this bottom part this is the power supply right here by the way it is an ibm power supply does say ibm part number right on there and it's probably very dusty inside uh yeah i can see a lot of dust in there although it's not too bad okay yeah that's that's dirty okay before i turn this thing on i'm gonna take this power supply out and i'm going to use a known good power supply on the motherboard here i'm not going to power it up from this one and then i'll plug this into a kind of a junky motherboard i just don't want to risk damaging this ibm original motherboard with a power supply that's faulty now i will have to say though on ibm's credit this power supply is probably somewhat over engineered and if any of the rails are out of spec say they're too high i bet you this thing shuts down immediately probably only works within a very narrow range of operation just to prevent any kind of damage to the motherboard and that's in contrast to the cheaper power supplies that don't quite have such robust protection so this is the original ibm kind of harness here for the disk drives in the hard drive so this one goes to the original two disk drives and if you bought the three and a half inch module to go in this thing it would come with an adapter that plugged into this and it converted to the little pins that are on the back of the drive and then these connectors here there was one that could go i think underneath the disk drives for a hard drive and then one that could go in this bay here a big full height seagate and there would have been two additional thinner ribbon cables that were for the two hard drives that someone must have removed and taken out all right so the power supply should just go forward i took the four screws out yes a little dusty there a little dusty here's the power supply i'm gonna use this is my bench power supply that's under that pentium board i always use and yeah the floppy disk is attached here because i was having problems with the power supply shorting against the underside of the motherboard even though the motherboard sits on a tray it would sometimes tilt over and short out and cause issues i never damaged anything luckily but nearly did probably but then the slots would stop working things like that okay we're good to go with the power it's connected up to the wall plugged in the motherboard i'm going to power this machine up with this this will tell us with these leds here if we're getting the correct voltage rails which of course i know this power supply works but in case something's shorted on here it'll turn off the power supply most likely and on the leds we have two seven segment displays here we should see the bios postcode i think the 5170 supports it maybe maybe not though at least i'll know the voltage rails are working so i think we're ready for testing here's the power switch right here here we go all right we're getting postcodes and we're getting a beep that is probably fine it's going between 31 and 32 so i'd have to go look that up that could be because there's no video card installed it does seem to be still changing 40. okay we're getting various error codes i mean i think this thing is working it is working so the next logical thing to do is let's connect up a video card i'll use this vga card which i know works as well and let's see if we get a display on here i mean all signs point to yes because we saw beeping and postcodes and things look at that popped right up 512 kilobytes of ram we got some errors there 601 disk error 162 system options not set and of course 601 disk error again we are just done it twice and if i hit f1 it's going to try to boot but there's no floppy drive controller so that's not going to work and this machine does not have a built-in bios menu oh it went to basic look at that ibm basic so yes as i was saying if you're not familiar with the original 5170 the buy house that's on here the ibm bios does not have any configuration options that you can go into you have to boot a floppy disk which then goes into dos and it configures all the options in the bios there are third-party utilities to do that i think g-setup is one of them or the other alternative is you can replace the ibm bios with an ami from a later 286 they are completely interchangeable like that and it will have a boot menu then well you know a bios setting screen as we are used to on most retro computers even up to modern day computers and then you can configure various things but clearly it's working there it is so how cool that this computer is fully functional justin told me when he rescued this and it was a rescue it was going to get trashed and he saved this machine plus some other things from being thrown in the garbage and that's just great because i like i mentioned i've been looking for 5170 for a while now to fix up my one with a broken front and this one this one so far is gonna fit the bill i need to know the motherboard is mostly working i think at this point i need to hook up a floppy drive to it so i can boot in to check it and let it run through some diagnostic tests three and a half inch floppy drive this controller card one that i know actually works i'm afraid to use that stuff that was in here in case any of it's broken that will just introduce extra troubleshooting variables i don't really need now i'm completely unsure is if this computer can actually boot a three and a half inch disk drive while the bios is not working i mean the settings have been reset that might be a problem because it's expecting a 1.2 drive which is the a drive on this machine that could cause it to not read this properly we'll see okay it's giving me a discard error not quite sure why it's attempting to boot i don't think it's working oh starting ms-dos it's actually working look at that and it just stopped loading light's not on okay i'm gonna go figure out what to do next how to get this thing booted into dos okay i'm back and hopefully this does the trick 1.2 meg drive or disc rather formatted with dos 622 and it has check it on it i did this on my other computer of course i don't want to try this drive that might be bad so i have a t-act drive here i think this is good i think i should really write on here with a marker to say if this is a 1.2 or a 360 because i have some 360s that are in the same front form factor bezel thingamajiggy okay let's hook this up i was reaching for the power switch that would be right there and it's not because it's back there okay let's hook this up as the a drive we use this power cable right here all right hooked up as the a drive let's put this disc in here and hope this drive actually works i think it should and i formatted this disc fresh seems that 1.2 meg discs are the most unreliable they're always failing and actually this one and i wouldn't have kept it if it had any bad sectors had a couple bad sectors on it so whatever i kept it still says diska error i wonder if this is configured for two drives by default like a and b and that's why it's saying just get error for the second one okay it's reading it's definitely reading so this is a 1.2 meg drive starting ms-dos fingers crossed is this going to work oh look at that it works it worked so it really just was having a hard time reading that that 1.4 meg drive okay so it's something to keep in mind if you ever get an ibm 5170 you do need the 1.2 meg discs to boot the thing if the battery dies oh there is a way and you can check minus0degrees.net there is a way to use basic to actually configure some of the bios options so you can keep that in mind i'm sorry that the disk drive is blocking the view of the screen everything is a little precarious on this small little bench area but i'm loading check it hopefully we'll see that blue check it screen in a second and i'll be able to find out how fast this machine is if it's six megahertz or eight megahertz i think ibm sold both varieties all right configuration information so as i expect it's 286 of course 512k ram of course 1.2 meg floppy drive of course and we have a biostate of 1985. i'm not sure if there even are later revisions of the bios for the 5170 i have been looking at date codes on the motherboard and i can't really make heads or tails i think 84 but the bias is from 85. so could that have been upgraded at a later time maybe or ibm used chips from all sorts of different years maybe a majority of the chips on here don't have date codes on them so it's really not easy to tell let's check out the main system benchmarks six megahertz so that is the speed of this machine am i mistaken in thinking that there's actually an eight megahertz version maybe maybe not i have to go read up about that on wikipedia i think i'm just going to set this to do looping ram tests right now so quick memory test i'm going to change it to no and i will make it loop and i think that will be good if this machine is stable it should run this i'm going to hit c for continuous it's just run this without issue and not crash so the ram diagnostics ran for hours and hours i think i left it on for maybe four or five hours no issues whatsoever so this motherboard is definitely working properly now while i was running the ram diagnostics i started doing some research on this computer googling around to try to figure out what exactly i had here there's a very useful page here on minus zerodegrees.net where they talk about the different revisions of the motherboard on the 5170. there's a type one and a two and a three well the biggest difference is that the two and three the motherboard is physically smaller but also the type one has very interesting ram here stacked piggybacked 128 kilobit ram chips of the 41 128 variety 150 nanoseconds i must say i've never heard of such a thing never seen such a thing but this motherboard in here is absolutely the version with the stacked memory when i took a closer look at these chips which you won't be able to tell from the camera angle here but these are stacked there are two on top of each other and sure enough they're the 128 kilobit type chips all of the later versions of this motherboard have less ram chips they're actually four rows of chips you can't see the two that are blocked by the metal here but there are four two more down here the later ones have half as many chips for the same 512 k and like i said the motherboard on this one goes all the way over to the far edge as far as it can go before it hits the power supply while the later motherboards are smaller here's a picture of the later version and you can see the ram configuration i'm talking about that is clearly different than what's on this one thing that is interesting is on the type 1 motherboard it says the bios supply date is 1 1084 so january 10 1984 well the version on this machine as seen here on check it is june 10 1985 which looking back on minus zero degrees this date coincides with the bios that would have been included with the type 2 motherboard now reading around on minus 0 degrees it did seem to indicate that this was not an atypical upgrade to this later version of the bios and that was because the original one didn't support that full height 32 megabyte hard drive that i mentioned when i was taking this thing apart so perhaps at some point someone upgraded this to that bigger hard drive and i think that was a pretty typical upgrade of the bios i don't know if that was an ibm sanctioned upgrade or that was something that dealers did or or what but the chips that are in there definitely are labeled ibm so they are original but they are the later ones if i reboot this computer there is an interesting issue that happens here and even though the floppy drive is configured correctly it does say system option is not set i haven't run setup but that 601 diskette error apparently that happens with this particular bios it's like a bug in the bios if you don't have that original ibm fixed disk controller card the one that was in here if that's not in the machine you'll basically always get this 601 error with no way to get rid of it i think you need to install a completely third-party bios like the ami bios the one i mentioned earlier where i could actually have a bio setup screen i'm kind of feeling though that i want to keep this machine as original as possible so if in that case i need to keep these original bios chips in here and i guess i'll just need to use that ibm card luckily i have that which will hopefully make this error go away all right so the stuff you see on the bench here these are the components i took out of this computer so we have hard drive controller the hard card ethernet card ega card serial parallel card the original battery i don't know i have one of the slot covers here this is the floppy drive that was in the machine and the original floppy and hard drive cable i've given everything an inspection and a little bit of a clean just the disk drive was dusty the rest of these things were actually pretty clean but i just cleaned up the contacts on the slot connectors stuff like that nothing is actually tested yet so i'm going to grab a machine i know works and we'll test all this stuff here on the bench first thing i just want to do and this is kind of silly get the multimeter out here let's just see if this battery actually has any life net left in it it is technically possible that it does hey we're getting two volts i don't think that's enough to run the computer the battery actually says ibm replacement on it panasonic six volt battery so clearly this thing if it's only giving two volts out is not enough to run anything but i'm glad it didn't leak all over the inside of the machine i'm going to use this 286 ast motherboard here for testing of these components nothing here is particularly interesting to be honest i just want to see if the ega card works this serial parallel works floppy controller works i'm not going to test the ethernet card because i don't really have a way to even see if that works and the hard card is definitely an interesting card i'd like to see if this does work because then we can poke around and see what's on the drive and of course i want to make sure that this floppy drive works it would be nice to be able to put an original ibm drive back in the machine but my other 517d which i plan to combine these two computers to make one has a working one of these drives anyway so it's not imperative that i have this drive working but it would be nice okay let's use this known good power supply with the floppy drive tape to it as my sort of stand for this motherboard we'll just stick a mouse pad on it one thing i really like about this power supply is it has nice long cables for the power to the motherboard first i just need to make sure this motherboard still works you never know i don't want to go chasing down issues with other things if the board is bad so this was the vga card i had in the other computer the 5170 when i was testing a second ago and everything is working 512k of ram which is all that's left on here i had to pillage some of the memory for something else sweet all right i think i'm going to plug in this big disc controller card let's see if we can get the floppy drive working in fact i'll just grab the drive well actually no i guess i can test with this drive here why don't i just do that i have the disc here i was booting has check it on there now i haven't cleaned the heads on this but i did give it a little bit of just a clean on the front i also lubricated the drive rails whatever the rails here on the head assembly it was just slightly dusty everything seems to be in good order with this drive at least visually it does in case anyone is wondering this is the sticker on the back of the drive here yd-380 1.2 megabyte manufactured for ibm corporation but made in japan all right things are connected and let's see what happens when we turn this on okay the computer did not power on there let me unplug this drive and it powered on there that would imply that there's a short on this disk drive let's just plug this back in one more time actually let's unplug the drive cable okay well that time it worked what what's happening here hmm do we have a short on 12 volt rail well that time it turned on it's weird that def up it turned on and then turned off let me unplug this let's see if the machine stays on it could well be the disc controller card that has a short as well okay we're getting an image there's got to be something wrong on this disk drive that's disappointing well let me just grab the teac drive that i was testing with and i'll try this make sure that this this controller definitely boots okay here we go let's try this again i'm anticipating everything is going to be fine there came up normal drive seek drive type mismatch hmm control alt escape 1.2 megabytes well that's fine f5 to confirm weird okay i'll just hit f1 drive failure what i'm thinking there's just something non-standard about the way this card works which is why okay normal seek but i'm still getting that drive error mismatch and i hit f1 it just says disboot failure without even trying to boot and i wonder if this has something to do with why that 601 error is happening on the other motherboard this card works in a slightly different way than a standard floppy drive controller which might explain what's going on now one thing i could do is i could take the ibm bios and put it on this computer on this motherboard it's an asc motherboard but there's nothing specific about this motherboard that precludes me from using the actual ibm bios on here so i think i'm just going to try that just to make this machine as similar as possible to the other one okay i have the ast motherboard up and running with the ibm bios well i think it's working it seems to power on i had a little trouble at first because this machine only had these two roms installed and i assumed like the 5170 they were 27 256's well when i put the same ibm bios images onto eproms on 27 256's in the two sockets here it didn't work at all and since the original roms had stickers i wasn't sure what size they were but it turns out that they are actually 128s so i went to the original type 1 ibm bios images from 1984. they would have been the originals that were on that 5170 that's behind me it has four 27 128s and this thing has all four sockets and for installing them on the motherboard i had no idea which order they went on but this was u17 27 37 and 47 that is the same order that it would be on the ibm motherboard and the machine powered on and it's posting so there it is disk error press f1 i don't have the drive controller connected so at least it's coming up let's just see if the keyboard is working because it could be a slight difference with the keyboard controller uh nope it works f1 actually made it continue so let's try the discount now okay so here is the original ibm controller again let's plug this into this slot furthest away from the ram cart ow just poked my finger because everything is the cables are pushing up on everything okay so there we go now let's see if this works i have that disc in there the boot disc we were using on the other machine power it up counting up the ram okay and what's it doing right now i don't know it's just sitting here hey no error and it booted in it booted into basic oh you know what i just had a thought i think this computer actually has built-in floppy controller right on the motherboard of all things pretty sure it's one of these connectors right here yes these are definitely floppy controllers now it was making it seek but it could well be that commands to the floppy controllers were going to both the card and the on board for like when it was sending commands to it look it's plugged into the motherboard okay still didn't now i know these are both floppy connectors because the connector is keyed has a pin missing and it is the same as the ibm card wherever it is right there both of that that same pin is missing on both those connectors as on that the floppy drives three and four yeah it just says disk error press f1 so it is that other one well this is not helpful this is a terrible motherboard for testing this video has gone down a path i did not intend it to go down okay i need to reevaluate what i'm doing here and start fresh okay well anyways i was saying about the double floppy controllers when both of the floppy controller chips were on the computer at the same time they're both occupying the same space in memory so when the bios writes to the floppy controllers to say spin the disk and read it well it's going to control both of them simultaneously but but as soon as you try to read anything off a disk what's going to happen it's going to send command to the controller to read and the controller is going to try to place that information back on the bus but the issue is there's two controllers in the same space they're going to be writing to the bus at the same time potentially or probably creating a conflict now it is weird that it's still not booting even with this plugged in the motherboard it's acting exactly the same but probably because one of the chip the one on the motherboard was just saying you know no drive or it wasn't returning anything and the one on the card was but there's definitely a bus conflict going on with both chips sitting on the bus at the same time it's quite possible that there are jumpers to disable the onboard controller but there's tons of jumpers on this board and i well i haven't actually looked to see if there's a manual to figure out if i can disable the onboard stuff but i think i'm just going to cut my losses and switch to a different motherboard one that i don't need to worry about all of this ridiculousness but actually i guess it was kind of cool that i got the original ibm 1984 bios running on this machine and it would be possible to take the later ones and just split the single 256 chips into two 128s and it would run on this board so if you have one of these boards and you feel like emily in the original ibm there you go you can do it all right we're back to my good old pentium board i always do my testing with i don't know why i didn't just use this in the first place the thing i like about this motherboard is it does support all different floppy types like all the way down to 360. and i can very easily in the bios just disable all the onboard peripherals serial ports and the uh does this even have serial ports yes it does but it has onboard floppy controller turn all that stuff off then i can plug the isa cards in oh but this is a bad motherboard for testing because of the cpu it's in the way of the long slots oh i i just need okay i'm gonna go grab another motherboard one that doesn't have this problem right here okay here's a 386 motherboard there's one that phillip from the uk sent me some does not have the problem with the long slots it also does not have the problem of onboard peripherals of any kind so i won't have problems with the disk controller hopefully that should just work okay all right first things first plug in the video card here let's just make sure we have an image all right ready for testing here we go right away the screen comes on and says check some error no problem f2 to run setup okay so we are going to just set the date to something other than that all right so how do we set this five and a quarter inch 1.2 megabyte we will disable the hard drive display we're going to set the vga ega cpu speed it does not matter f10 to exit all right drive read failure no problem let's just i just want to eliminate every variable i'm going to plug the drive into my known good controller i want to see this computer at least boot to uh dos so i can run check it power that off pop that in power that on i have no idea how long the bios saves the settings there's no battery on this either so i have no idea how long that lasts but okay very quickly did a drive seek there i mean could this disc just be bad it's it made some booting sounds it's just sitting there oh you know what i should just re oh no starting ms-dos okay good we are good we are working all right so out with this known good controller and i'm gonna test out this ibm one here 16 bit with hard drive fancy there we go luckily this long cable here is the one that goes to the flappy drive i just want to make sure that this cable works with this disc controller here we go good old seek sound is it gonna work sounds like it's working i'd hope that someone has gone in and set jumpers on this card at some point because i do see some jumpers to disable the hard drive portion of it i assume that's a supported configuration in case you have a 5170 that doesn't have a drive probably this was the card that came with all of them and there it is so we're booted up and it's successfully loaded check it so i am going to say i'll just put a little tick mark in the corner here no that didn't work out i'm going to put it right here on this chip i don't know if the hard drive portion of it works but that doesn't really matter i don't need to use that anyways all right so we have a good original ibm floppy controller and cable why don't i bring back the ibm floppy drive that was causing issues now this has the drive rails on it you do need drive rails to stick anything into that case it is a problem because it's not like they they were included the extra ones for hard drives and things so if you're going to try to mount an extra disk drive in there you're going to need rails luckily i created some drive rails and i put them up on thingiverse i'll go find that link and stick it in the description but i printed some i think for my ibm 5170 the one that i the broken one to put the three and a half inch drive in there i needed the drive rails and i printed them out i even made the little parts that go on the top here you screw them in to hold it in so those are there it's very helpful because it's impossible to find these now all right so let's move this disc over here i am thinking that the issue might be something to do with the motor driver if i try to turn this on and it immediately doesn't work i think there's a short in something that controls the motor and the disc is in there it's going to try to spin it as soon as i power the computer on let's see no it did did turn on see if we see any access here well it sounds like it's working now i wonder what was going on i didn't do anything drive reed failure though okay well that way that's fine this just could be dirty um i shouldn't have put that in there without trying to clean the disc heads first so i have this cleaning diskette that was sent in by a viewer thank you very much and i have two of these one of them i keep with this top cover here for single-sided drives but clearly there's a second or a double-sided one i don't know what these things are for on the side so i'm just going to use them let's stick this in here and we'll hit f1 to get this thing to try to boot now the best thing to do would be to take this pcb off try to clean the heads manually with a some of my little cleaning things over there but the reality is it's a pain there's heat sink here and stuff so i'd rather just try to do it with a diskette why should you clean your heads well sometimes it gets so bad that they can't read anything anymore that's why okay so let's see if this can boot now if it can't boot doesn't mean this thing is dead it just means it's going to need a little bit more maintenance actually it sounds like it's working you can't really hear it but i feel it i think we're going to see ms-dos prompt starting or starting amazon just a sec there it is cleaning the heads did the trick that's all it needed now i was saying let's load check it here i was saying that if the drive weren't working what i would probably do is boot this machine or a machine up on something else and then i'd run imd and that helps you do drive alignments and stuff like that and really clean the heads properly by taking this drive more apart and making sure that it can read known good disks but let's see if it boots in to check it then this drive is actually good it's pretty quiet i like these stripes look at that it works it freaking works in fact i think there's actually a disk check thing in here which i should just try uh test floppy disk a and i'm not gonna do a write test obviously it's disk inserted yes i'm going to skip the right test s here we go so this sort of exercises the heads moves them back and forth since i put a little bit of lubricant on the drive rails that should just help work it in it's still curious to me why this was causing the computer to turn off before i don't really get that maybe you know this maybe was maybe the power cord on the power supply is just loose the ac power cord that goes into it could have been that and maybe i just jostled it slightly i'm not sure off camera i took my multimeter and i did check the 12 volt and the 5 volt rails on this and they were fine yeah look at that pass all tests it was able to do all the random seeks without any issue thumbs up working disk drive all right i am just going to draw a tick mark on the drive right here just to say that i have tested it and it is good next up i think i'm going to go for it and i think we're going to try out this this is the hard card here this only works in 8-bit slots which the 5170 has i think two of the hard drive portion sits lower than the 16-bit little extension here so and then i'm going to prop this up because normally this slots into the case right here i'm going to stick this post-it note right there and it's resting on top of a chip there we go that's in there just not to jostle it because it's rather heavy let's see if i turn this on will this even work highly likely it will not it's not even spinning i mean there's like nothing happening it's acting like totally dead here so you can see on the bottom here this round section that would indicate that the disc is right here so i'm going to try to get this thing to rotate around the center spindle which is right there by hitting it like this drives can have something called stiction i'm not sure if that's an actual term but the drive gets sort of stuck the spinning portion gets stuck against the heads or the motor or whatever and sometimes all you have to do is just kind of get it to uh turn and that should do the trick okay here we go let's try again i really don't think this thing is gonna ever work oh it spun up that did it ah little stiction action let's see what happens the drive is spinning but i'm not hearing any head activity it's like there's no sound of the head doing anything look at this 1701 controller number zero error no boot disk available the disk is out here yeah i think i'll just power cycle this a few times to even get this hard drive to do anything yep controller error again i think what i'm going to do is just let this sit here like this and bake just get hot maybe that'll loosen up the head assembly in there so it'll actually work a little bit i've actually found that to help a little bit sometimes well this has been running for a while and it sounds a lot worse now so i think this thing is dead i'm gonna put the microphone next to the hard drive so you can hear it up close and personal you hear that ticking sound that this thing makes as it spins down definitely sounds like a head crash i think the heads were basically stuck to the disc surface and when i did my spinny thing it dislodged the heads the drive could spin but that basically destroyed the disk surface in the process and that's just par for the course with these old hard cards these things are so unreliable i think at least i've had 10 of these come through the basement one worked all the other ones were dead and they made horrible noises and just didn't work it's just a total shame maybe on a second channel video i'll open this thing up we'll take a look inside okay so not a whole lot left to test since the hard drive is dead uh there's a serial card here let's just pop this in here i won't do full testing but make sure the computer turns on and in check it i can see that there's a serial and a parallel port aha computer doesn't even start with that in there so this is shorted works fine with it out one of these tantalums here is going to be shorted let's take a quick look with the multimeter see if i can figure out which tantalum is bad and remove it should not be too hard to figure out okay we got .9 ohms there that one's definitely bad or shorted and 6k there which is fine these are the strange three-legged tantalums 10k so that's fine i'm just going to give a quick check on these other ones i'm just going to put a mark on the top of the tantalums that are shorted so it's that one and that one i just need to find all of them and see which one has the lowest resistance value on the multimeter so 0.86 on that one and this one over here 0.83 so it's lower there it's usually these larger tantalums that fail so i'm just going to remove this one could be this little one over here as well so i'll take this one out first all right well i was struggling to desolder it so i just cut it off let's just quickly check to see if it's shorted anymore nope it is not shorted any longer and this one over here should not be as well and it is not so that was definitely a bad cap all right i replaced the tanon with another one it was very difficult to desolder this board obviously is using i think it's there's at least three layers it's got a ground plane in between and it must be really thick copper because it was really hard i had to use hot air to just to just to get the original one out while i cut it out but to get the little legs out not easy so it's a little bit butchered but it's definitely it's on there and it's not shorted anymore so this should work well i mean it should work if this card's not damaged or broken in some other way at least the computer will turn on now let's see what happens oh that is super hilarious that blew up that was the capacitor i just installed why did it blow [Laughter] where's the cap that i where are the caps that i just installed here are the caps i installed um 10 micro farad 16 volts so why exact exactly did that just explode wow yeah okay i was boneheaded i had the polarity reversed so that is what can happen to your tantalums when they're in backwards you get some fireworks all right so that teaches me a lesson to pay a little bit more attention to the polarity on there okay so i've replaced the tantalum that's exploded it's this one right here yeah it's a little ugly i really should have done a better job heating the board up to get that capacitor in there but um this should do the trick hopefully it's visible this one right here next to it has a plus in the middle and this one actually well it had a plus there it got kind of removed from the desoldering and re-soldering but yeah so the polarity was wrong there's a little mark on the tantalum and that is plus when you have this type here you can install them either direction because the center pin is positive i think it makes manufacturing easier so it's negative on each of the outside pins and positive on the center one so when you put these in you don't have to worry about the polarity but you put these in you do you have to line up the dot with the plus which is the middle pin you do not need to hook up both of them at least on this board i think it's on now oh yeah so here's an example right here you see how the two outside pins are connected together and that's because uh they are the ground anyhow okay let's see if these serial ports are actually working a little bit of time has passed and i have since got the postcard out here this just gives a nice visual indicator if the power is working because there's all these red leds here so i'll just plug this into a slot behind and here we go let's turn it on aha to see how the lights all came on for a second and then shut off this card must have a short on it again so there it is comes on fine without this card installed so time to figure out what exactly is wrong now with this card all right so the capacitor i just installed not shorted no problem the three pin one next to it though this one right here this one is now shorted and that was definitely not shorted originally in fact i powered this up after that cap exploded without the cap installed and the board worked fine but now this one is bad so yet another tantalum failed alright so i figured out that this cap here and this cap here on the same rail of course they're both reading as shorted but when i measure the resistance across both of these this one registers about 0.05 ohms and this one 0.03 and that's with my multimeter set to uh relative mode so i i've taken out the the leads as part of the resistance so anyways that says that it's this one that is shorted so i'm going to get the hakko desoldering iron and i'm going to pull this out properly this time instead of butchering the board all right here's the cap i removed yeah with the taco it came out very easily i did still use a little hot air to get it out or heat up the board a little bit it made it really easy to come out let's see if the if it's still shorted so let's just check here yep shorted so this cap over here was shorted and it's not anymore and this one was shorted from the first cap and it's not anymore this is the new cap and i also took the old one out and put it back in oh what a mess i made there i just assumed i could use some solder braid to get that out but really i had to use the hakko so if you are trying to remove caps on this as the three-legged ones the two-legged ones are easy heat one leg lift it up heat the other leg lift it up then use some solder braid but with the three-legged ones it's a little harder to do that so if you don't have a de-soldering iron like a hako i recommend you cut these off and leave as much of the leg as possible and then use the soldering iron to try to heat it up and tweezers to pull each leg out but then even with the good quality solder braid it was still hard to clean out those vias um that's where the hakko came in the hot air helped but it still was a pain okay so this is the next day from when the little fireworks happen so i have a three and a half inch drive connected here this has a boot disk on it so i've rearranged a little bit so that's why the five and a quarter inch is missing but let's turn it on do we get an explosion no explosion and also we don't have a short circuit all right well let's boot this up should boot into dos without any problem i am glad that this power supply does have some protection i've actually never really tested that that when the rails are shorted it actually does shut itself off and prevent explosions to some extent at least all right here we are and check it shows lpd1 and com1 fantastic i have a de-9 loopback adapter for serial i think this works with check it i had one for parallel this was a viewer who sent this in but the parallel port one did not work with check it for some reason it just wouldn't on a known good parallel port i would say that it wasn't working so i didn't keep that one just in case i would think i had a bad parallel port but i know that serial port one worked i think if i go to serial port com1 test and i pick the loopback adapter is external loopback connected yes it is here we go i think this works should work maybe all right here we go passing all the tests oh modem control failed though but the loopback is working there we go so yeah serial ports working excellent cool so this card i'm gonna put a tick mark down here on the back that it works excellent and also don't follow my lead on doing a horrible job replacing a cap causing it to explode and making the board look ugly just don't follow my lead all right the last card i want to test is this the ibm ega card here of course i don't have an ega monitor handy but that's no problem i have the rgb to hdmi right here which will work perfectly with this ega card so i just need to pop out the vga card that's on this machine because you can't have a vga card and an ega card in simultaneously i'll take out this 8-bit ega card that i was using for testing let's pop this baby in oh it's pretty cool it has a notch right here so it does work in a 16-bit slot but this part of the board is lower down so you have to make sure that it doesn't have any clearance issues on the motherboard i think this should go in without issue like right here yeah it just clears the cpu math code processor without issue plug in the nine pin cable here this is what goes to the rgb to hdmi which i will need to power up by plugging into my power bank this ega card is filled with these tantalums here the three-legged ones as well they're also on the motherboard the 5170 motherboard which we know works but that has me a little worried maybe before i turn this on now you know what whatever let's just turn it on and see what happens i was gonna say with the multimeter i should uh do some continuity tests but forget it let's turn it on see what happens will we get an explosion or will we get a working system all right well all the power rails are working oh look at that it came right up there it is check it diagnostic software i just switched the scaling mode to interpolate 4x3 just as the aspect ratio looks correct now let's just quickly take a look here all right there we go it says ega for the adapter excellent i don't think i ever noticed it can actually enumerate the stip is on the ej card and certainly those are the switch settings right there zero one one zero and right there it confirms we have 64k of video ram which i think does limit us to some extent when it comes to graphics modes that this card can display okay so the flashing here is because i am i think it's running in cga mode right now and we need to switch this to subprofile auto switching there we go so it can now switch into cga correctly so it'll be able to handle those switches with a little bit of glitchiness but nothing serious so this is currently running in cga resolutions not ega and there's the actual ega resolution right there here is the 16 color mode in 320 by 200 that's that's ega but it's running a cga resolution i don't think with 64k we have the ability to run any of the higher resolution modes in 16 color mode but i might stand corrected let's see what the next oh no okay wait this is 640 by 200 at 16 colors so that's working so cga resolution still instead of one color you get 16. what about um yeah that's it so we do not have any longer the 640 by 350 the ega native resolution running in 16 colors not without a ram expansion on this card so it's cool that this card works but without the ram expansion it's definitely limited in its ability to run those high resolution ega graphics not that a regular 286 at six megahertz really going to be able to do much with those but nonetheless there are games that do use that 640 by 350 resolution and at 16 colors and those will not work on this card so that's a bit of a bummer but there you go i do have other ega cards that are you know later clone ones and they're about you know this size way smaller and they have the full complement of ram on them so they can run all the higher resolution modes without any issues so it's really just a limitation of this unexpanded ibm card i am just going to draw a little tick mark right here in the corner just to show that i've tested it and that this card works and with that i'm gonna end part one here this episode certainly had a little bit of a bang in the middle there didn't it yeah so in part two i'll be looking to expand the memory on the 5170 because 512k is definitely not enough i mean it's enough for a little bit some applications but to really be able to run a wider gamut of things on this machine i'll need more than 512k so we'll look to figure out how to get the machine upgraded and also look how i can get the machine working with a little bit more storage than a five and a quarter inch disk drive i'd also like to thank once again justin for rescuing the computer and bringing it down to portland for me incredibly nice of you and of course i have to thank all my patrons whose names are scrolling up the side of the screen right now if you want to become a patron yourself there's a link in the description below or you can get to my patreon page and do so and of course all the youtube stuff thumbs up and subscribe and comment section below all that good stuff and if you haven't already checked it out i would recommend you take a look at my second channel adrian's digital basement 2 where i have a different set of videos and i'm releasing a couple a week they're much quicker videos a little more off the cuff less editing things like that so check that out and that's gonna be it so stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time bye you

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 137,244

Keywords:

Id: hKgIdBIeCN0

Length: 63min 34sec (3814 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021