Olivetti TINSL setup disk wanted

[Spectre]

Yes, I know it's ancient but it's more for amusement .

I can't set the machine up as it needs a program to access the BIOS, the setup diskette. If anyone knows of one or where I can download one from please let me know.

It's an archaic Olivetti M4 464 TINSL 486DX2 66MHz .

 

[MH]

fooking ell!

Next you will be after an 8" Floppy.....

 

[karym6]

blast from the past here i think...

what bios is it? if memory serves award bios was the weapon of choice for pre-pentium machines?

do you think maybe the battery on the mobo has died, losing the bios itself - or can you actually get into the bios screen?

even though this is old, it probably shouldnt require a setup disk for the bios itself - have you any idea how to clear the bios back to default on this? it may be the best thing to try first.

also, i may be trying to teach you to suck eggs - do you know if there is any os installed at all?

 

[shaun127]

Yes, I know it's ancient but it's more for amusement .

I can't set the machine up as it needs a program to access the BIOS, the setup diskette. If anyone knows of one or where I can download one from please let me know.

It's an archaic Olivetti M4 464 TINSL 486DX2 66MHz .

is this what your looking for mate

http://www.bios-drivers.com/drivers/1/1127.htm

 

[Spectre]

blast from the past here i think...

what bios is it? if memory serves award bios was the weapon of choice for pre-pentium machines?

do you think maybe the battery on the mobo has died, losing the bios itself - or can you actually get into the bios screen?

even though this is old, it probably shouldnt require a setup disk for the bios itself - have you any idea how to clear the bios back to default on this? it may be the best thing to try first.

also, i may be trying to teach you to suck eggs - do you know if there is any os installed at all?

Some legacy machines needed a program to access the CMOS settings, the machine was out of use for some time and the backup cell is probably dead and the machine can't auto-configure the HDD (WD Caviar 213MB =)). I cleared the settings but I think it needs to be configured to other than default.

I can't remember what BIOS manufacturer it was, maybe I'll look again tomorrow. I know there are some odd sequences of key presses for some of the older ones.

There is no OS present, had the disk in another machine, no partition either.

I was going to build a Linux micro-kernel for it and see if I could make a webserver. With 8MB RAM, although I do have some more .

is this what your looking for mate

http://www.bios-drivers.com/drivers/1/1127.htm

I might give that a go but I suspect it will be hardware specific.

 

[karym6]

Some legacy machines needed a program to access the CMOS settings, the machine was out of use for some time and the backup cell is probably dead and the machine can't auto-configure the HDD (WD Caviar 213MB

ah yes, you are quite correct about this, i forgot!

have you considered trying hiren's boot disk at all? the last time i used one of these it had somet cmos utils on it...

 

[Spectre]

Is there a bootable 3.5" disk toolset? The only thing the machine reads on boot at the moment is the floppy drive.

I have heard of the Hiren Boot collection (I have one somewhere...) but have never had to use it, I know that it's quite popular though.

There is no CD-ROM support on the Olivetti machine, it does have two IDE channels though .

If I can get the HDD recognised, the rest might fall into place (LOL...).

 

[karym6]

have you tried attaching a cd rom at all? failing that, have you tried a boot floppy from bootdisk.com?

 

[Spectre]

Sadly, I haven't yet .

Been working today and will probably be tomorrow so I have a limited amount of meddling time .

 

[karym6]

when you get a chance, have a go - i think a win 98 boot disk will at least give you cd rom drivers - this should let you get an os on the disk and fdisk it if you need to

 

[Spectre]

I do get round to things, it just takes a while (eleven years) to build up the enthusiasm but I've been watching retro computer stuff on YT lately.

Why did I think this needed a setup disk? I read it somewhere, I'm sure. Booted it the other day after having to move stuff about for a gas pipe installation and into BIOS, HDD recognised although MB needs a battery.

I tried a few boot disks but they didn't fully load and seemed to stop at the same point each time. I took the floppy drive apart and removed the stepper motor that drives the head to clean and grease the helical drive and runners. Put it back together and the boot disk loaded so I partitioned the 213MB WD Caviar HDD and formatted it. The noise of the thing is ridiculous!

Burnt a Windows 95 4.00.950. Found an IDE CD ROM and plugged that in while I was waiting for the CD. The IDE cable looks quite short between connectors as it has to jump over the floppy drive.



Found a suitable vintage 3COM EtherLink III ISA network card and installed it. I'm sure I had more than the three ISA network cards I found in this room...



Started Setup (after wondering why D: didn't exist then seeing that it was R:...). The network card was detected, that's convenient.



Remember the excitement?



Took a few goes to get the mouse working as it had defaulted to disabled in the BIOS. I installed TCP/IP and set the networking up and could view network shares on an XP machine but as Windows 7 and Server 2008 asked for a password mine happened to be too long for Windows 95 to accept.

I'm surprised web browsing worked at all and I knew HTTPS would have been out of the question so I'll have to install a more suitable browser but I think we should start a thread to see who can browse DW on the oldest hardware.

Nearly browsing on a 486DX2 66MHz with 8MB RAM from 1995 according to stickers inside...



I might have a better graphics card somewhere and I've recently seen some RAM which might fit.

 

[MH]

Haha brilliant!

This thread also made me laugh because it contains the knicker sniffer! Lol

I've binned my old hardware, so I will not be worrying you on the old tech front.

 

[Ferret]

Wow

95 the stuff of nightmares

 

[spud1966]

windows 95 on cd well posh just as well it was not on 39 1.44 floppies pmsl

 

[Spectre]

I can't get a browser on with 128-bit encryption . I did get Firefox 1.5 installed but that didn't have any encryption compatible with DW. I gave up trying to load Seamonkey95 after 30 minutes of drive crunching.

Might have to upgrade the RAM. This must have been quite a late manufactured 486 but that isn't much memory for the time.

 

[Spectre]

Wow

95 the stuff of nightmares

Nightmare that I can't get a Trident 8900D graphics card installed. Missing jumpers too. I see the Trident stuff during BIOS screen and I can install the driver but no VGA from the port. Windows 95 finds it but there is no video. I think this might be the only 16-bit ISA graphics card that I currently have in stock .

Disable onboard VGA results in no video at all from either port.

This is why I've always liked MBs without onboard video from the start.

Might skip the graphics for the moment and move onto the soundcard and RAM...

 

[Spectre]

Found a 4MB stick of EDO DRAM amongst my small inventory, I know there is more in some other PCs in here somewhere but I need a better way of keeping track of things. That took RAM to 12MB.

Stuffed a Yamaha OPL3-SAX soundcard in too so I have a joystick port and actual sound if I can find an amplifier to plug it into.



Still miffed that the graphics card won't work though. The splash appears in the BIOS but there is no output and as far as I remember there should be enough in its ROM to do basic graphics so I suspect it may be faulty. It probably came out of a skip at work.



I have read that the Trident ISA graphics cards weren't too good in terms of drivers and support. There seems to be loads of versions built by many different companies around the chipsets. I couldn't find an exact likeness of the 8900D based one as shown above left.

 

[spud1966]

that was the first pc i got dx486 had to rum memory maker to play some games had 4meg lol

 

[Spectre]

I'll get something interesting installed!

 

[Spectre]

Well, I didn't get anything good installed. Might have to scour torrents for 1993 version of Doom or something.

There is an ISA slot on the mainboard itself, the other three are on a riser. Maybe I'll try the graphics card in there in case there's an IRQ conflict or some sort of priority issue, although nothing was reported.