Monthly Archives: February 2017

Resetting Disks Is Hard

After digging through BIOS listings and disassembling the Adaptec 1542C BIOS as well as the PC DOS 2000 boot sector, it’s clear why the floppy-less SCSI boot does not work on my test system. It’s because disk reset done by the boot … Continue reading

Posted in BIOS, Bugs, SCSI | 22 Comments

Booting Is Hard

So I had this brilliant idea of using SCSI drives with old 286/386/486 boards which have old BIOSes that can’t handle IDE drives bigger than 500-ish megabytes. The SCSI HBA is the first one I happened to grab, an Adaptec 1542C … Continue reading

Posted in 386, BIOS, CompactFlash, DOS, SCSI | 21 Comments

Spot the Fakes

Would you believe that besides all the other Made in China fake brand-name items, there are also fake memory modules? Of course you would! At least Kingston and Samsung modules have been seen in the wild; the Kingston ones are … Continue reading

Posted in DDR RAM, Fakes | 17 Comments

IBM XENIX 1.0 Incompatibility Details

Some time ago I wrote about IBM PC XENIX 1.0 and why it won’t work on 386 and later processors. Thanks to a kind reader, I’ve been able to analyze the object files used to link the kernel, and I believe … Continue reading

Posted in 286, 386, Microsoft, Xenix | 21 Comments