stan mcdonald
2014-10-24 16:45:37 UTC
I recently purchased a VMC16 Milltronics milling machine which has a 486 PCI board in it and has American Megatrends bios dated of 10/10/94
id string is 41-pa00-00-1343-00101111-101094-u880s9-h
When I fired the machine up it did not load the controller software correctly and gave me a dos prompt after a bit which leads me to think the sim-disk is bad.
No problem because I was able to copy the contents of A drive to floppies so I have the cnc directory the Rom directory the Ram directory and the Tc directory from drive A.
When I did a directory of B drive it is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo so I did not copy it
I also have a 4 gig disk on modual (small solid state hard drive that plugs on the main board).
I took the solid state hard drive and installed it on another computer and used Fdisk to partition it to 2 gigs (the dos limit for hard drive partitions) and installed Dos 6.22 on to the solid state drive.
I then copied the CNC, Rom, Ram and TC directories on to the solid state drive thinking I would now at least have a backup for the info which was on drive A of the sim disk.
I then used EDIT to go in and change the paths on the path.dat file from the A and B to drive C.
I next installed the Solid state hard disk on to the secondary IDE plug on the main board. I could not use the Primary IDE because if I do the Floppy plug will not fit due to the fact that the solid state hard disk is slightly larger then the conventional plug that would normally be used. One also can not just plug the hard disk in to a cable because the hard disk has a female plug which is the same as the cables because the main board has male plugs.
With all of this done I figured it would be a simple matter of going in the bios setup and selecting auto-detect on the bios so it would figure out the specs for the solid state drive and I should have a system which will partly boot.
No luck
when I got in to the bios it allowed me to tab over to the auto detect and I was able to save the settings (remember this is for the secondary IDE).
when I rebooted the computer the bios recognized the solid state drive on post but would not load the OS.
I figured maybe it cant because it should have been on the Primary IDE slot so I swap it to the Primary and attempt to go in to the bios to change the auto detect over and the BIOS will not allow me to change anything and has an arrow like u would see if you could use a mouse. I therefore restart the computer with a mouse but it doesnt work either.
I repeated the above with a second solid state hard drive partitioned to 100 megs just in case the board was unable to go over the 540 meg limit and again no luck.
I call American Megatrends and they cant tell me how to change it back and the info I found on line is of no use as it doesn't work.
Cross referancing the sting ID it looks like the board is from SHUTTLE HOT -433 version 4 which matches up with the AMI post screen which says (433AUS33) UMC880 for 486 PCI
Therefore can anyone shed light on how to replace or eliminate the simdisk?
Thanks
Stan
id string is 41-pa00-00-1343-00101111-101094-u880s9-h
When I fired the machine up it did not load the controller software correctly and gave me a dos prompt after a bit which leads me to think the sim-disk is bad.
No problem because I was able to copy the contents of A drive to floppies so I have the cnc directory the Rom directory the Ram directory and the Tc directory from drive A.
When I did a directory of B drive it is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo so I did not copy it
I also have a 4 gig disk on modual (small solid state hard drive that plugs on the main board).
I took the solid state hard drive and installed it on another computer and used Fdisk to partition it to 2 gigs (the dos limit for hard drive partitions) and installed Dos 6.22 on to the solid state drive.
I then copied the CNC, Rom, Ram and TC directories on to the solid state drive thinking I would now at least have a backup for the info which was on drive A of the sim disk.
I then used EDIT to go in and change the paths on the path.dat file from the A and B to drive C.
I next installed the Solid state hard disk on to the secondary IDE plug on the main board. I could not use the Primary IDE because if I do the Floppy plug will not fit due to the fact that the solid state hard disk is slightly larger then the conventional plug that would normally be used. One also can not just plug the hard disk in to a cable because the hard disk has a female plug which is the same as the cables because the main board has male plugs.
With all of this done I figured it would be a simple matter of going in the bios setup and selecting auto-detect on the bios so it would figure out the specs for the solid state drive and I should have a system which will partly boot.
No luck
when I got in to the bios it allowed me to tab over to the auto detect and I was able to save the settings (remember this is for the secondary IDE).
when I rebooted the computer the bios recognized the solid state drive on post but would not load the OS.
I figured maybe it cant because it should have been on the Primary IDE slot so I swap it to the Primary and attempt to go in to the bios to change the auto detect over and the BIOS will not allow me to change anything and has an arrow like u would see if you could use a mouse. I therefore restart the computer with a mouse but it doesnt work either.
I repeated the above with a second solid state hard drive partitioned to 100 megs just in case the board was unable to go over the 540 meg limit and again no luck.
I call American Megatrends and they cant tell me how to change it back and the info I found on line is of no use as it doesn't work.
Cross referancing the sting ID it looks like the board is from SHUTTLE HOT -433 version 4 which matches up with the AMI post screen which says (433AUS33) UMC880 for 486 PCI
Therefore can anyone shed light on how to replace or eliminate the simdisk?
Thanks
Stan