This arrived today

[Retro6]

I bought this the other day as it was going very cheap and couldn't pass it up.

Its missing its hard drive and needs some TLC I'll be restoring this old PC.

It don't look to bad inside. Motherboard looks good and parts look good visually although I won't be powering this up today because its very cold from being in transit and I'd rather wait until it gets to room temperature first.

You can't tell from the photos but it does have a lot of dirt and dust inside so I want to clean all that out.

I will give it until tomorrow before putting any power into this but the power supply will have to be fully checked first so that nothing goes BANG.

Its another retro IBM machine untested.

 

[Retro6]

I had a 300GL (or something) before but it had bad caps and wouldn't POST 'very well'. It locked me out of some BIOS settings that resetting the BIOS and removing the battery wouldn't fix! In the end I scrapped it (could have kept the case in hindsight) as no one would it for £10 (or even free!) locally.

I would have kept the case, cheap replacement AT motherboards do show up on ebay in fact you can buy a new old stock one for 15 quid and the seller has a few of them. I never had any luck with the IBM 300GL's there was always issues with the motherboards I ended up replacing the boards in them altogether. I have two of them.

 

[Retro6]

Just a little update...

This machine was a big bust... essentially I've bought a case.

PSU was no good although possibly repairable...

I borrowed the PSU from my PII system to try in it and the motherboard has problems. It will take a good 5 minutes for the computer to actually post then gives a BIOS corruption error warning and then when I do get into the BIOS it freezes.

There is also no life in the optical drive,

I will restore the case and take a new photo. The case is almost finished I just need to make a new drive bay cover to cover the gap at the bottom of the optical drive. For this machine to be functional it will need a replacement motherboard and power supply which I really don't feel like spending money on this right now. It will be repaired at some other point . I'm just a bit cheesed off that it will cost me 40 to 50 quid in parts to get it running.

 

[Retro6]

Guess it can be expected with old hardware.

Most definitely.

I might be able to save the PSU I've got it open and I've now got power 3v, 5v, 12v but there is no power going to the fan, I've tested the fan and it works but I need to find the fault on the PCB of why no power is being delivered to the fan.

The optical drive is completely dead like its not getting any power so it could be something simple I will open that up next and see if I can revive that. I would have put a DVD optical drive in this machine anyway but it keeps me busy for an evening.

 

[Retro6]

I've done some more work on the IBM and made a new drive bay cover from some white plastic. Its a little whiter than the case. The CD ROM is rather yellowed but works it will do until I sort out something better. Anyway I just wanted to get this photo up to give y'all an idea of what this will look like "when complete"

I did have a nice beige DVD CD-R optical drive but it wasn't doing anything when tested. I have had success reviving dead drives & repairing faulty optical drives in the past. When the a disk is inserted nothing happens so I opened it up to take a look, I found that a ribbon cable had partly came out from its connector. I re-connected the ribbon cable and on testing it ran and read the CD's but was making a terrible noise so I put that aside for another day and choose another optical drive to use for the time being.

I also had a spare replacement motherboard socket 370 and PSU. I have no more IDE hard drives so at the moment I can not go any further.

 

[Retro6]

Good news I repaired the original PSU and I've found a suitable replacement board for it, a socket 370 I had in my spares. Hopefully with a new hard drive I should have it up and running with Windows 98 SE apart of me wants to install OS/2 WARP.

I have tested it with a CF card and installed Windows 98 without a problem apart from missing drivers for onboard video and sound. I should be able to get around that with a Sound Blaster LIVE and I have a PCI ATi Radeon 128 RAGE video card to put in it.