[classy computer repair music]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing
about this lovely thing [chuckles at impending tasks]
It needs a little work.
Hopefully we'll be addressing this stuff.
This is the IBM Personal Computer XT Model 286,
otherwise known as the 5162.
I don't know if it's working, I've had it for a while now
I need to see if it works.
And it needs some restoration, that much is clear,
whether or not it's functional.
Hopefully this will be pretty interesting.
I've talked about IBM PCs and XTs and ATs
and different 286s but never a PC XT 286.
In case you're not aware, this is a system
that IBM introduced in late 1986 as a kind of
not really a stopgap, it -- so this is the weird thing.
It's a 286, and it came out after the IBM AT did.
And it was only on the market for a year or two
right before the IBM PS/2 line came around
and the IBM AT was discontinued.
So I've always wanted one,
but they are incredibly rare, apparently.
They're certainly valuable.
The value keeps shooting up over the past
however many years I had been looking for one, but yeah.
It's a lot like an IBM AT, except it's in a PC XT case.
And in fact, in some situations that apparently
could outperform the PC AT 286
at least the earlier ones.
So I might like to try and put that to the test
if we can get one of these working.
And yes, I did say one of these because...
I have two of them. Augh. [laughing]
So, thanks to Jonathan and Wesley for sending these
in my way a good while ago now.
I've just kind of had them sitting here
waiting to be restored.
I just, who knows!
Who knows what's going on inside at all.
In fact, let me turn these around.
All right, so as you can see this one internally,
at least from the rust and the battery leakage going on,
that is in a little rougher shape,
they both need some serious cleaning up though,
at the very least.
And again, functionally, there's no telling.
So that's what I'm going to try to do here today
is try to get them working,
or at the very least get one of them working.
Maybe sort of Frankenstein the two together if need be.
Ideally, I'd like to get them both working, of course,
because they are rare machines.
So yeah, and we'll just, we'll see.
IBM 5162, and they both have the badge.
In fact, this one still has the plastic on it, that's nice.
They were manufactured in Armonk, New York,
at least these were. A lot of them were actually
manufactured in Scotland, my IBM AT over there was.
It's got a power supply in here that is a little beefier
than were some of the earlier PCs because support hard disks
and more expansion cards and such.
And then these battery bays, these are interesting in fact,
let me just go and open them up.
This one I'm especially worried about 'cause it looks like
it has leaked and ruined a bunch of things.
I believe these are six volt lithium of some kind,
probably the sa-- yeah.
It's like the same ones that you get on a PS/2.
The IBM PS/2 has used the exact same type for
the battery backup of the settings
and the clock, and all that kind of stuff.
Now for the top one.
Well, that screw does not wanna budge, it's moving.
Yikes.
Well, we'll just put that back
and we'll get back to that later.
Anyway, yes, so we have the I/O section over here
with eight expansion cards each, or slots for the cards.
I think they're mostly 16 bit, actually maybe 8 bit.
I don't exactly remember right now, but yeah.
There's also the keyboard connector,
which I don't think is restricted
to the PC XT style of keyboard.
I think you can plug in like a five pin AT keyboard
here and it'll work just fine.
Like I said, it's just a strange hybrid of the AT and XT.
But yeah, the actual cards that are installed, I don't know.
I mean, obviously, we've got parallel and serial cards,
and there's a modem of some kind here.
This is probably a hard disk card or maybe a controller,
floppy, whatever.
Got a game port, it looks like down here,
and probably a floppy and hard disk controller card
from one of these.
This looks like CGA 'cause it's got the nine pin video
right there, and a d-sub connector and then composite.
And then up here it looks like a VGA connector.
So we got 15 pins right there.
So it'll be intriguing to see what's inside and of course,
what survived with all this nastiness going on.
But lets open them up, and see what we find.
[jazz music fades out]
Alrighty!
We're gonna start off with
the nastier of the two,
the one with the rust and battery leakage around back.
Neither one of these systems have all the screws around back
they're supposed to be five, they each only have three.
It's a little bent.
There we go.
Let's see what the damage is.
It's not great, but could be worse honestly.
Actually the motherboard itself
doesn't look terribly damaged.
The battery did however, leak onto the keyboard connector
and into the power cable connectors from the power supply.
The other thing I'm concerned about
are the tantalum capacitors,
see these little round yellow dudes in there?
They tend to... blow up. [nervous chuckle]
I'm just gonna be careful
whenever we do end up powering it on.
I mean, obviously, the ideal thing would be
to just replace them immediately,
but I don't have any replacements right now.
Yeah, they're one of those things where
you just, you can't tell if they're gonna be okay
or not just by looking at them.
Anyway, let's check out the cards
and things that are in here
since we can actually see precisely what we got now.
So first up, we do have quite a beefy hard drive,
not in capacity obviously, it's only 20 Megs
but pretty standard for AT class machines,
a type two, classic.
We have two different disk drives.
Looks like the top one is the standard 1.2 meg
five and a quarter inch
that they came with, by default, with the one below it...
Forgot to look at these earlier.
But yeah, you see this one with a little asterisk.
That usually means -- in fact I think it does for sure,
it means it is a 360K. In terms of the expansion cards,
in this one we've got all these are 16 bit ones here
and there's one eight bit one.
Looks like that is the video card
but, this is the pretty much standard
IBM floppy and hard disk controller here.
We have a serial and parallel card
of some kind installed here.
This is a modem, and we have a Hardcard.
Plus Hardcard XL 2105 it looks like,
I've never run across one of those that actually works
but that would be nice.
And then of course lastly is the graphics
and we'll see what that is.
Let me just take some of these out,
I wanna see what they are.
Alright, so here is the modem.
Practical Peripherals.
Made in USA, copyright 1991.
I like the speaker that has on there.
Probably like a 2400 bps, I don't know.
Yeah, check out that Plus Development Corporation Hardcard.
I've got, I think three of these now and none of them work.
Look at this little Cirrus Logic VGA card,
Got a CL-GD5401 chipset on there.
I'm not too familiar with that one,
but seems like a basic little card.
Bet it would do the job just fine.
Let's open up the other one, see what's inside that.
Oh, this one just has the 1.2 meg.
Let's see here we've got the hard disk, which is,
I don't know, it doesn't have any markings.
It's definitely a Seagate, ah! It is a ST-4038, wonderful.
As for the cards, yeah, that is definitely CGA card there.
One of the older ones with the amber brown kind of PCB.
The hard disk and floppy disk controller
looks like it's probably the same one as the other one.
In fact, this too the serial parallel seems to be the same.
This on the other hand, there's not much going on there.
It is just a straight up Analog Input Card as it puts it,
just a 15 pin game port, for plugging in joysticks and such,
no branding or anything.
A lot of these were made by Kraft.
This is just a generic looking part.
Let's check out the CGA card.
Yeah, I really like the way that these look.
I've got a couple others of these, IBM ones man.
They looked really cool, look at that brown dark orange
Copyright 1981, I believe I'm gonna use that for testing
the display and such just 'cause I have an IBM 5154
enhanced color display over here that'll work for CGA
and EGA so that'll be nice.
It is honestly looking pretty clean, all things considered.
I mean, it still needs to get cleaning but you know,
considering it hasn't been cleaned yet that's not bad
at the 286 down there and we have some...
This is gonna be a thing I don't know.
I've heard the RAM and these can be a little iffy
'cause I think you've got 128k
of just these little socketed doohickeys down here
and then you have these two modules that add another 512k
taking it to a total of 640k of system memory.
You take out these cards here
because we just really only need are the graphics
and the floppy and hard disk controller.
No sense and mucking up the troubleshooting period.
Alright if you're worried about my desktop surface here,
Don't be, I always get comments about that.
"Oh, you're sliding around scratching it up!"
It's just a vinyl laminate.
I'm gonna go ahead and put a new battery in here.
Hopefully if it boots up we'll be able to,
get into the software and save some settings
and whatnot with that though.
Can I get this plugged in
and just see what happens.
[chill reassembly beats]
After I've plugged in, let's power it on or try to.
[computer loudly whirs to life]
Well that's [laughing] about as good as I can hope.
640K ram, okay.
We got the 161 error
which just means we need to run the setup program.
Otherwise we can run basic, looks like it's running
in 40 column mode as well, intriguingly.
Hey, so we're gonna need a DOS,
we're gonna go with version 3.3.
Assuming the floppy drive works,
I don't have it cleaned or anything, really just want to see
if this was worth cleaning first.
Looks like it probably will be, it's trying to load.
All right.
Gonna give GSETUP a shot here.
This is one of those computers
where you can't just enter the BIOS on its own.
You have to have some software.
It does not like the 40 column mode.
Okay, well, let's try to put it on color 80 columns.
Okay rebooting, that looks better already.
We're able to actually see what we're doing now.
So let's see, get the time going.
Hey Flerblenerp, what time is it?
- [Flerblenerp] It's 11:08
- Oh jeez.
[computer beeping]
What day is it?
- [Flerblenerp] It's Sunday, April 26 2020.
- I honestly didn't know.
Yay, Y2K compliance.
So disk drive A, double sided high density 1.2.
I have 640K base memory.
As for the hard disk type, this is an ST-4038.
I don't know what type that is.
I didn't see it printed on the actual hard drive
but should be a type 20.
Interesting, the other one was a type two.
So this one's 32 megs instead of 21, ooh.
Cool. Should be it.
It's got just this red LED that's just been steady on here
for a bit as it's booting.
We'll see if it'll try to load anything on the drive
or if there's even anything on there.
I don't know.
Aha, 1782 disk controller failure, indeed.
Yeah, let's see here.
We know that the controller card itself
is like properly seated and whatnot
'cause the floppy drive is working from the same card.
I'll just open it up and see what we can find.
[Utopia Windows startup sound]
Ayy, got some stuff going!
So I've been messing around with this for half an hour
or something.
I swapped the cables, and tried some other settings
and moved around the positions
on the card and whatnot, nothing was working.
However, I decided to try.
This is the one that wasn't there, the hard disk
and floppy disk controller.
The other card from the other system
is identical to this one, which means it should in theory,
be able to read this MFM drive and check it out.
It booted first time with the card from the rust bucket.
So we've got DOS version 5, apparently,
is installed on this machine's hard disk.
So dude! Got some DOS things in the DOS directory.
But this is pretty cool.
Looks like Windows 386 is installed.
It was installed.
[laughing]
Apparently, and now it's not.
[backwards Utopia sound plays]
Yeah, other than a very base install of DOS 5,
potentially from 1991, If the date is to be believed,
wow, there's not much going on here.
But still, it's working.
And that in of itself is pretty fantastic.
Yeah, let's go ahead and... get this cleaned up.
Maybe get the faceplate put back on there and yeah,
see if I can maybe get the 360k disk drive
from that other system and put it into this one.
But as we're doing that, I may as well address
the rusty nasty situation 'cause it's pretty gross.
First thing on this one,
I wanna get this battery disconnected at the very least.
Maybe take the whole compartment out of there if I can.
It looks like it would come off
but it's just so nastily in place now.
[exasperated chuckle]
Those leads just snapped right off of there.
There we go.
Again, thankfully not as bad as it initially looked
but gunk caked down in there.
This whole thing is gonna have to come apart.
I do find it intriguing there's like a full MFM drive
and a Hardcard in here.
Wonder if one's broken or if they just wanted both.
This is the one that was closest to the damage.
Actually looks okay, except for that around back.
So underneath here you have some of these screws
for disconnecting the floppy drives from their cage.
That screw out of there should be loose, yep.
It's still catching on something,
and look at that beast.
Comes out like that, we have this crazy assembly
of double floppy disks.
Well there was that one screw there but the rest of it
seems to be held into clips.
Actually no, there's one screw there too
that is rusted in place.
And this is on top of it, that is annoying.
I tried getting the whole thing out of there earlier
but it's not budging.
It's just so stuck in place man.
Yeah, there's a part of you normally squeeze
to get it out of there but...
Wow.
There we go.
Look at that disgusting thing.
That battery is never coming out of there.
Man that is not easy to get out of there
even at the best of times.
And there we have it.
XT 286 motherboard in dire need
of cleaning, and here's the worst of it.
It at least didn't eat through the entire board.
Those two screws there, are so rusted together.
I can't even get like the screwdriver to go in.
See these metal bits, slides in place,
holding it to the back
so you can't even like pull it forward.
[Dremel buzzing, music fades out]
Okay, so here is the floppy disk drive assembly
from the rust bucket.
And here's the 1.2 meg assembly
from the one we're trying to fix up.
But yeah, for this one, the 360k drive that I'm going to be
hopefully adding to this.
Hopefully it works.
I just went ahead and took apart the assembly
with the other drives at 1.2 meg that is untested.
Just gonna take that out of there
and cleaned up this 360k drive
a good bit. Blew some compressed air through there
and just dusting away things with an anti-static brush here
and lubed up the rails on the bottom so the head assembly
can move freely once again and then just wiped down
everything I could reach with some alcohol wipes and swabs
and cleaned it up to make it look, eh you know,
a little bit better than it was.
So yeah, just going to put this drive on top of here
while after I clean this really quick.
And I guess that means
we won't be needing this bottom part here.
Look at that.
It's got like this pretty substantial drive placeholder,
not just a plastic faceplate on front.
[synth music plays]
This entire assembly was not even attached inside.
It was just sort of jammed into place, I found.
Yeah, this one actually needs even more lube
than the other one did.
Oh yeah.
Much better.
you know I meant to test
the 360k drive before I installed it in this cage
but I'm going for broke I guess.
All right, let's get plugged in and configured
and see if it works.
[clean synth music plays]
Such a cramped fit with all these cables back here.
[floppy drives buzzing]
[computer beeping]
Alrighty!
So floppy disk B should be...
Hehe, "bee."
360K, five and a quarter inch.
[drives buzzing]
[computer beeping]
It's making weird noises.
But it's working.
All right.
I don't know what that sound is man,
maybe it was just the head repositioning itself,
but that disk works.
Now let me see I've got something else here.
Yeah, got Planet X3 they're loading right up.
[computer beeping]
Dude. Yes.
I'm so happy that this is coming together. [laughing]
Okay. "Have a nice DOS!"
I will, David!
Well, let's go ahead and get MS DOS 5 installed on here.
And yeah, I'm going to install DOS 5
instead of the one that originally came with from IBM,
which was DOS 3.2, because I don't have that exact version
on hand. I was thinking about putting 3.3 on here
because you know, it's a great version
to have on one of these.
I posted a poll on the LGR Twitter and I was like,
which one should I install?
You said DOS 5, so we're gonna do it.
It's what was on here from the previous owner.
So it seems like it's almost respecting it somehow.
I don't know, let's install DOS.
Yay, DOS.
Yep, looks good to me.
[floppy drive reading]
[disk being removed, swapped]
Ohh, an error occurred on Drive C.
Yeah, okay, well.
Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and run a format.
just restart everything on our C drive.
[hard drive clunking]
Uh-oh!
[concerning hard disk noises]
Oh, no is it dying?
Definitely heard the head knocking around there.
All right, well, it's doing it this time.
Ah, maybe it'll be better after a format
but we still have that other drive to try.
In fact, I wanted to try it out anyway.
So if this doesn't work or if it's a little iffy,
I'll try the other hard disk.
Well, it completed the format.
I'm not entirely convinced,
but we'll try installing DOS 5, see how it goes.
Dang, error occurred while reading or writing.
Doesn't even want to start up at this point.
[angry PC beeping]
1780 disk failure.
I'm gonna plug in the other one and see what happens
and [chuckles] yeah,
Hopefully I can still get the other one working
but a low level format can take a long time.
I'ma give this a shot right now.
[clunky hard disk noises]
That doesn't sound good either. And before we write it off
though, just gonna change the drive to the correct type
in the BIOS.
[confimation beep]
Whoa, what do you know?
Listen to this thing
Thing is just chirping away
like the most 80s-sounding hard disk I've ever heard.
Some kind of a hard disk checking utility
is going at the moment.
I don't know what it's doing.
It's taking a while.
Wow!
Okay, there's a lot more on this one
than the other one.
I see WordPerfect, prodigy.bat
I wonder if there's some Prodigy files I can get off of here?
Running DOS 6.0.
Wow that did not sound good when I first started up
but got the right drive type selected
and it seems to be doing okay.
[drive softly chirping as it reads]
The sounds this thing makes are incredible.
51,200 bytes in bad sectors but overall not too bad.
So here's the thing that popped up at the beginning.
"Notice to all users, do not alter any format"
Nyah-nuh-nah.
And now I wonder what in the world
this thing was, heh,
connected to and running back in the day.
It doesn't look like Prodigy's installed.
No there's nothing, that sucks.
Oh, it looks like we got CrossTalk here.
So yeah, somebody was talking to some other computers.
I'm assuming this was the modem that was in here.
So Hayes 2400 compatible, make sense.
I see it is also trying to load a Logitech mouse
and that Hardcard so maybe,
maybe the Hardcard actually works.
That would be pretty wild.
That'd be the first time I've ever seen
one of those working.
Don't wanna get my hopes up though.
Yeah, considering this drive is working
as-is I don't even know if I wanna reformat it
and redo things like I was planning on.
I kinda just wanna leave it.
And maybe plug in like a compact flash thing
and just get all the files copied
over to that and backed up and yeah.
[laughing]
This autoexec... is a mess.
I mean, look at this path list!
Looks like there was some COBOL work being done on here.
[laughing]
You never know what kind of history you're gonna find
on these old hard disks.
Man, that's pretty nuts.
I was hoping we find even more in that 31 meg one,
but there was like nothing on there.
And then this 20 meg one
that I didn't have much hope for.
It's full of stuff.
I'm just gonna leave it as-is for now.
Hopefully, it'll continue working and I can get
that other hard disk working at some point.
But yeah, for this one, I'm just gonna leave it as-is.
All right, so that's cool.
Let's get it cleaned up now and all presentable.
Yeah, this is coming along!
Okay, let's get this case washed.
[sudsy jazz music]
See how the top part of this case
is actually kind of more gross than the other one,
which was the rusty one.
So I don't know which one I'm gonna end up using in the end.
But yeah, I'll clean them both.
Also notice that both cases actually still have
a little plastic protective bit
on the front of the badge there.
It's turning a little yellow.
So many scuffs and marks and weird
like, mottled grossness.
Yeah, that'll definitely help some.
Don't wanna rub the entire coating off though.
Just bits like this that are straight up gouged in there, tsk.
It's a definite improvement.
Not bad.
So here is the rust bucket case
and overall I think it's actually in better shape
underneath some of this grime, but. Whatever that is?
A little bit of rust back there and of course,
some seriously gross sticker residue.
I got one of these adhesive peeler thingies
Yeah, this will do the job.
It's just gonna take a while so I'm gonna do that.
[sighs] Okay, that was just tiring but yeah, that worked.
It's just sticky and gross now,
so some of these goo removing wipes
should do the job pretty quickly.
Lifting that junk right off.
As for what this is, I don't know where it's kind of oily.
Might be oil. [chuckles]
It smells like oil.
Yeah dish soap, doing a good job cleaning that up.
As expected, this is looking much better than the other one.
Check it out, that looks basically new at this point.
A couple of little, you know, gouges
and things here and there, but like, the top cleaned up much nicer.
I think the front did too.
It's still just got this
little bit of sticker residue here.
I'm gonna use another little bit of this goo crap
and see if I can get rid of that,
rinse them off and let them dry.
[running water, jazz music fades out]
Okay, let's get the serial card installed back in here.
[upbeat rebuilding music]
Still got two blank areas
since nothing's installed over here.
So, I got a couple of these brand new I/O plates.
So this little plastic thing goes around the floppy drives,
haven't cleaned that yet
I like the way it snapped.
I gotta get the hard disk put in place
but the screws that were in here were really gross.
And they didn't match. I'ma get some new ones.
Much better.
I can't forget the chunky power switch.
Gotta clean that up.
Overall it does look like somebody at least wiped it down
at some point before me 'cause it's not that dusty.
Yeah, it's looking pretty good.
All right time for the case topper
from that rusty machine.
I have bent it back into shape.
Hopefully it'll be a little easier going on
and it was coming off.
Oh yeah.
That's like perfect, perfect, perfect.
Wow. Augh.
This cleaned up... so nicely.
And it's all working, at least right now.
[cautious chuckling]
Oh yeah, let's finish setting it up and turn it on
one more time before we finish things up here.
Yes, I have all five screws now.
Of course we can't forget about the little screws
that go in this hole on the bottom
to keep the drives in place.
And these little things have to go all the way...
[clumsy clunking around]
Man, that is just irritating.
I also have some replacement cork feet.
I'm going to swap out here.
You can see it's actually missing one
and these others have slid out of place.
I'm gonna remove them entirely
and replace them with brand new ones I've ordered.
But they haven't arrived so I'm not gonna do it right now.
Check this out, I got a 5153.
Now that is a lovely pair: 5170 AT,
5162 XT.
This really highlights one of the disadvantages
of the 5162.
Despite its zero wait state memory going on
that made it a little bit faster than the six megahertz AT?
You can see it's actually physically shorter,
which meant that some of the newer cards that were designed
for the AT class computers would not physically fit
inside of the 5162.
All the cards I have do but there are some that are taller
and when you go with like a 16 bit ISA bus
you just can't use them on a 5162.
Finally, time to power this thing on,
now that it's all set up,
complete, looking amazing.
Here goes!
[computer triumphantly whirs to life]
[whispering] Ah, yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[computer beeps, hard drive chirping]
[chuckles] Crazy hard drive.
[laughing]
Oh look at this!
So yeah there we are
we've got the PC XT Model 286 restored, working beautifully
for the moment until something happens here.
I'll do my best to get all the data
off of this and backed up and of course
I do still want to get the other 5162 working
if I can. At the moment, the state of
it isn't particularly great.
I mean, I cleaned it up but yeah,
I don't know if the motherboard works.
Power supply is in terrible shape, in fact it's still
inside of there. I cannot get it out.
I need to get some other
kind of bit or something
for my Dremel or drill or whatever.
I got to get those screws
because they are stuck rusted in place.
Anyway, that's another project
for who knows when, but this is working.
I am so happy that it's working.
It's been four days working on this thing.
So yeah, let's try some CD-MAN on here
because I feel like it
I'm just gonna run straight off the disk, CD-MAN.
This is different, "install CD-MAN to the C drive"
"the D drive," I've never actually tried this before,
so I wasn't expecting that, hmm.
You know what, I have an idea.
I've got two IBMs so why not take the opportunity
to start both up at the same time.
[PCs power on simultaneously]
Wait a second. CD-MAN is an EGA game isn't it?
Oh what am I -- What am I even thinking? It won't run
on the 5162 because I have a CGA card.
Hey Wheel of Fortune though, that'll be a thing.
[PC speaker WoF theme plays]
Okay, you can stop.
Well, if anything this demonstrates the difference,
I guess between loading the floppy disk and hard disk.
Obviously. But also the fact that the PC speakers
And this XT 286 over here is a lot quieter
than the one in the AT. Or at least in the position
it's in, perhaps. You've got the speaker right here like near.
That one's like facing the, you know, whatever.
Anyway, different things. [typing] LGR, LGR.
That load time.
There we go. Let's see what kind of differences
we got here in terms of -- both are 'person' puzzles
in round one.
It's so weird hearing this in stereo in this room.
I'm gonna search 'L' or guess.
Oh, no Ls here, but there's an L over there.
What is this garbage?
It's hard to get the colors to show up correctly.
[chuckles] Oh!
I've never actually seen these two.
Seeing these two side by side is pretty nuts.
Actually, I like it.
All right, well anyway,
Wheel of Fortune, can we not quit?
No, we can't I guess.
So uh, that's okay.
Alrighty, well that is it for this video,
this particular project anyway.
Like I said, still want to do something with that other 5162
But yeah, for now, yeah.
This is just amusing to me.
I hope you enjoyed seeing this come together.
Maybe it encourages you to restore an IBM or some
other computer project you've been putting off
or whatever.
If you enjoyed watching this, that's good enough for me
if you want more of this kind of thing
and check out some of my other restoration and fixer up
projects I've done in the past and whatever else
I happen to post here every week on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.