Category Archives: PC hardware

Every Bit Matters

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A couple of months ago the OS/2 Museum got hold of a 13.6 GB Fujitsu MPE3136AT IDE drive from 1999. The drive was working… more or less. It behaved quite strangely; the drive was detected and readable, but seemed oddly … Continue reading →

Posted in Fixes, PC hardware, Storage | 6 Comments

Return to Stormville

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A while ago I griped about a strangely ill-behaved Intel DX79SR Stormville board. To recap, the board simply refused to take any memory in the 4th memory channel. Since then, there have been very interesting new development in the story. … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware | 3 Comments

Seagate Serial Talk

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, the OS/2 Museum obtained a 10 GB Seagate ST310014ACE hard disk (IDE 3.5″ low profile). The disk was unusable because it was locked. That is, it needed an unknown password to gain access to the medium. After … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware Hacks, PC hardware, Seagate | 19 Comments

X7DBE WTF

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Several years ago I got two Supermicro X7DBE boards at a bargain price. These are nice dual Socket 771 boards of circa 2007 vintage, built around the Intel 5000P Blackford chipset and using FB-DIMMs with up to 32GB memory supported. … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Supermicro, Xeon | 18 Comments

Memory Trouble in Stormville

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a genuine Intel DX79SR (Stormville) board. Together with its close siblings DX79SI (Siler) and DX79TO (Thorsby), these were the last “great” Intel motherboards, supporting the big LGA 2011 socket for the Sandy Bridge E platform—but … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 14 Comments

Linux 2.4 APIC Hang

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The other day I set out to install SuSE Linux 7.3 (Linux 2.4.10 kernel) in a virtual machine, primarily with the goal of evaluating if the included MARS_NWE NetWare emulator is any good. But I couldn’t get anywhere–the boot floppy … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Linux, PC hardware | 16 Comments

Emulating EtherLink

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Spurred by the discovery of a pre-release OS/2 NetWare Requester from early 1988 with a very thin selection of drivers, several months ago I decided to write emulation of the classic 3Com 10Mbps Ethernet 3C501 card, also known as EtherLink. … Continue reading →

Posted in 3Com, Networking, PC hardware, PC history, Virtualization | 33 Comments

Another Strange 286 Board

Posted on January 20, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum sometimes seems to have a knack for acquiring hardware so obscure that it cannot be even identified. One of the more recent arrivals was a seemingly typical Baby AT 286 board with an 8 MHz CPU. The … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, PC hardware, PC history | 27 Comments

More Fun with ISA DMA

Posted on January 13, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A reader comment on a previous post on ISA DMA pointed out that UMBPCI (or rather the DMACHK utility distributed with it) does something unusual with regard to ISA DMA. There was a suspicion of somehow accomplishing the mythical memory-to-memory … Continue reading →

Posted in PC architecture, PC hardware, Software Hacks | 8 Comments

The Cape Cod Disaster

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about: It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history, Pentium III, RDRAM | 44 Comments