Ok, some background. A friend and I are trying to pull files off of an ancient hard drive - someone he knows was using this machine, bought used in 1992, to store some document.
It's a Compaq Portable, from 1982 - except with a hard drive (which I think makes it the Portable Plus - http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html). It's been sitting a while since the file was last updated.
Now the keyboard has completely stopped working, and the plug for the keyboard is like nothing I've ever seen before. Otherwise, it boots up, the old screen still works, and we get a command prompt. So, we have no way to operate this thing directly.
I noticed that the (enormous) controller card for the hard drive (an MFM hard drive) is an 8-bit ISA card. I have an old PC, working, with an ASUS P3B-F (Slot 1, but I have a Slot 1 to Socket 370 adapter, thus running a Celeron 1.0GHz in it), which has PCI and ISA-16 slots.
The card fits into the 8-bit portion of the ISA slot, all well and good. At first, with the card plugged in and the hard drive connected, it wouldn't boot.... assuming that this indicated issues with conflicting DMAs, I removed the ethernet and sound cards, as well as disabling the serial and parallel ports in the BIOS. This allowed me to at least boot to the OS (running Win98lite - a hybrid of Win98 SE with the Win95 GUI)
Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. Running the wizard to search for non-Plug-and-Play devices doesn't find it. Trying to manually search, as Win9x had info for a lot of ancient devices, I don't seem to see anything under Hard Disk controllers, or Other Devices, that seem to fit what this disk controller card is.
The card is about 13-1/4 inches long, and here's the information I have on it, from the remaining brittle stickers, or engraved numbers.
On the front.
- (c) COMPAQ COMPUTER CORP - 1983 (at the bottom left of the card)
- *1507* (at the top right of the card, upside down, with a barcode above the number)
- ASSY 61-031074000 REV Y 14 SERIAL NO I051470 (at upper right, though Y14 and I051470 are on stickers, while the rest is printed on the board itself. Also, I am not sure if the first digit of the serial number is the letter i or the number 1, but it appears to be of a different font and slightly lighter color, as if printed by something different than what printed the rest of the number)
On the back:
- ASSY NO. 100637-001 REV G
note that the 001 MIGHT be DDI. Both the 001 (or DDI) and the G are hand-written with some kind of whitish marker.
Most of the numerous chips on the front are permanently affixed to the board, but there are a few DIP chips/circuits that are removable. They are
a DIP28 reading:
(c) COMPAQ 1982
100693-4
OKI M3864-15
JAPAN 4446
a DIP40 reading:
(c) WDC '83
WD1010A-PL
05-05 8509
a DIP40 reading
WD1015PL-14
8416 02
The hard drive that was attached to this thing still works, as evidenced by it booting up in the Compaq itself.
Anyone have any idea how I can get this card working on the Win98 PC I have, and read off the drive? Or, if even without the card, how to get this hard drive attached and functioning to something modern to grab the data off the drive?
Budget = about $0. Yeah, we actually found an MFM-USB adapter for something near $200, which was obviously completely out of the question.
It's a Compaq Portable, from 1982 - except with a hard drive (which I think makes it the Portable Plus - http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html). It's been sitting a while since the file was last updated.
Now the keyboard has completely stopped working, and the plug for the keyboard is like nothing I've ever seen before. Otherwise, it boots up, the old screen still works, and we get a command prompt. So, we have no way to operate this thing directly.
I noticed that the (enormous) controller card for the hard drive (an MFM hard drive) is an 8-bit ISA card. I have an old PC, working, with an ASUS P3B-F (Slot 1, but I have a Slot 1 to Socket 370 adapter, thus running a Celeron 1.0GHz in it), which has PCI and ISA-16 slots.
The card fits into the 8-bit portion of the ISA slot, all well and good. At first, with the card plugged in and the hard drive connected, it wouldn't boot.... assuming that this indicated issues with conflicting DMAs, I removed the ethernet and sound cards, as well as disabling the serial and parallel ports in the BIOS. This allowed me to at least boot to the OS (running Win98lite - a hybrid of Win98 SE with the Win95 GUI)
Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. Running the wizard to search for non-Plug-and-Play devices doesn't find it. Trying to manually search, as Win9x had info for a lot of ancient devices, I don't seem to see anything under Hard Disk controllers, or Other Devices, that seem to fit what this disk controller card is.
The card is about 13-1/4 inches long, and here's the information I have on it, from the remaining brittle stickers, or engraved numbers.
On the front.
- (c) COMPAQ COMPUTER CORP - 1983 (at the bottom left of the card)
- *1507* (at the top right of the card, upside down, with a barcode above the number)
- ASSY 61-031074000 REV Y 14 SERIAL NO I051470 (at upper right, though Y14 and I051470 are on stickers, while the rest is printed on the board itself. Also, I am not sure if the first digit of the serial number is the letter i or the number 1, but it appears to be of a different font and slightly lighter color, as if printed by something different than what printed the rest of the number)
On the back:
- ASSY NO. 100637-001 REV G
note that the 001 MIGHT be DDI. Both the 001 (or DDI) and the G are hand-written with some kind of whitish marker.
Most of the numerous chips on the front are permanently affixed to the board, but there are a few DIP chips/circuits that are removable. They are
a DIP28 reading:
(c) COMPAQ 1982
100693-4
OKI M3864-15
JAPAN 4446
a DIP40 reading:
(c) WDC '83
WD1010A-PL
05-05 8509
a DIP40 reading
WD1015PL-14
8416 02
The hard drive that was attached to this thing still works, as evidenced by it booting up in the Compaq itself.
Anyone have any idea how I can get this card working on the Win98 PC I have, and read off the drive? Or, if even without the card, how to get this hard drive attached and functioning to something modern to grab the data off the drive?
Budget = about $0. Yeah, we actually found an MFM-USB adapter for something near $200, which was obviously completely out of the question.
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