Welcome back! Let´s continue our previous adventure with a quick detour!
Since the motherboard was out and very accessible, I decided that was a good idea to take the opportunity and test out a bunch 30 pins SIMM memories modules that I have in my stack.
I could use Check it! To test them, but I went with MemTest86+ since I have a lot of experience with it and trust it more. There are a lot of versions for MemTest86+, in my case I downloaded a couple and install it in 3 ½ floppy disks until having one that was able to boot up correctly in the 386, the lucky one was the 2.11 version.
First tested the 8 Mb that already were installed in the motherboard, remember that each of this RAM nodules are 1 Mb in size. Also take note that this test tales some time, so you can usually do others things while these test runs. In my case I decided to go for 5 complete laps of ach memory set.
The origin for the random bundle of memories is… rather unknown for me now since I have forgotten from where I got them. But most surely the origin was salvaged a long time ago by a younger me.
To my surprise, only 3 modules reported problems! Two directly caused a black screen with the machine unable to start up and the remaining one always failed in Test 6, only changing the pattern where the fail appears based on which slot was the memory installed on. Its nice to have 21 Mb of 30 pins memory modules for my projects!
Since I was feeling good with the stability of the motherboard, I decided next to test out the system with its original hard drive that I tested and copied several months ago, and was waiting in a shelf since then. Sadly… well… you can hear it below…
Not impossible when speaking of very old hard drives, they seems to be ok and ended dead 10 minutes later. But I wanted to test a hard drive anyway to be sure that the IDE controller card was ok, so I picked up this old Seagate ST351A/x, with a whopping 41 Mb of capacity, but that I knew that at least have installed a working DOS copy.
That one worked perfectly! I will try to back it up as soon as I can just in case, don´t worry!
So the next phase for this machine is going to be to put it together again and see what I can do to have a nice 386 clone machine… or maybe upgrade it? I have this Texas Instrument 486 TX486DLC/E that should be compatible with the motherboard since the BIOS have the option.
See you all in the next one!