IBM XT 286 Part 1 hard drive issue 

Excellent, this video is my cup of tea. I have performed my share of shouting euphamisms to the sky with clawed hands facing up, all while staring at error codes related to hard drives on vintage PCs....please keep the videos coming.

I love these old IBM machines, they are just so cool! I hope to get one someday.

Brilliant! I always forget the old WD drives meant Winchester. How soon we forget the lineage of our faithful hardware.

Thank you so much for these videos! I've recently come into ownership of one of these XT 286's, and these videos have been invaluable as a starting vintage computer collector. Thanks a ton!

Good video again. Yes, I did learn something. Now I know how to correctly install an old harddisk in those old machines. Hope to find one one day.

Fantastic! I never had 286 at my hands (started later with 486) but this is anyway a thrilling video!

Man! The ST-225 was indestructible. I used to collect and sell a bunch of them as "recently" even as 1993-94 when building "new" machines out of leftover inventory. I was surprised to see that was an ST-225 when you pulled it out as I was expecting a true, full-height drive, not a half-height with special mounting hardware. I've actually never seen one done like that. Cool! And great video as usual.

Thank you for helping me with my 5162. I really need to learn more about this stuff. I added the GPU from my spares box since the EGA Wonder was artifacting/broken.

Thanks a lot for that video !! Just busy trying to revive the 5162 / 5154 pair from my father (they were in the cellar since the mid 90's...). It started with the magic smoke on the display, so I'll fix the 5154 PSU first before trying to startup the PC... I'm crossing fingers, but have somehow little hope that it was handled properly (it has the 20MB drive, they surely never used the park utility), would be very happy to see the code from my Turbo Pascal experiments from the mid 80's, when I was a teenager... :-)

Flashes me back to my PEACOCK 286 PC times and installing MS-DOS 6.22! Nice video, thanks! Greetings, Doktor64!

Really very useful information. Thank you!

why would someone dislike this? good work as always man!

My first computer, well, mine was the model before. 4mhz. 1987. Loved it. Kings Quest.

I wish I could have some of this IBM.... So hard to find out thus treasures here in Brazil and when found it are so expensive.... Anyway this is a great content.... Congrats.

Nice videos and narration.

OAK is very good board, run fine in ms-dos games. Brand new parts! In 2020 ! Again... just amazing!!!

I have a soft spot for these IBM XT2 (I like calling them that for short) machines; I consider them to be one of the first "sleeper" machines due to the zero wait state memory, allowing them to walk all over the 6MHz AT in performance.

fantastic video as usual thanks! :)

Very Good. Nice trip down memory lane.

Most interesting of those 80s IBM machines.

I love the sound of th MFM drives

Interesting and informative as usual. I have an IBM Valuepoint type 6384, 486 DX2/66 and I love it. Nice info about the web sites too. Cheers.

Those floppy and hard drive cables are easy to get confused. I learned a hard lesson about a year ago when I tried to connect a 5.25” panasonic floppy drive thinking it was a floppy cable. I scartched my head why it wasn’t working, turns out it was a hard drive cable like the one in the video. I had spent a lot of money on that drive on ebay, send it back to the seller in the uk, was a lot of trouble get the money refunded. In other words it was a complete nightmare and my last experience with ebay only because of IBM making things confusing with their twisted cables🥶. Well, the whole ordeal thought me a lot about floppy cables and I made a whole study of potential pitfalls with floppy drives only because that floppy error 40 give my nightmares! True story. You are a life safer because with modern computers with sata cables whe take things for granted but back in the day you literally pull out your hair wondering why something didn’t work. These vintage pc’s demanded respect from their users, almost like stubborn cats.

This video and repair reminds me of some old IBM manuals at my old work place related to repairing AS/400 and also IBM printers. While not the same, working on old hardware like this really does need thick manuals to reference diagnostic codes and pages upon pages of flow charts to map out the process for changing parts out. I don't know how anybody could have worked out all these steps, especially BOTH the cable type with the fold AND the jumpers. I kind of wonder if computers back then needed to be so complicated due to hardware limitations, or if it was just bad engineering that led to them being so seemingly unnecesarily complex.

I was recently thrown for a loop with some full- and half-height floppy drives that had similar drive select and termination issues.

I usually just put the drive select shunt block one pin aside, so it bridges DS1 and overhangs the socket by one pin.

great content! was hoping you would go back to doing these types of videos

Nice. I didn't know about twisted MFM cables, that is nice to know, and definitely an error I might have made. I've really only used IDE and SCSI, missed out on a lot of the older disk tech. Maybe an idea for a future video? There were others as well, I remember seeing ESDI and RLL drives, but know nothing about them. I wish these old IBMs were easier to come by. I saw one for sale last year, and it sold for over €600, and that didn't even have a keyboard. Meh. I so want one, preferably an AT with an original EGA card and monitor! :)

Nice OSSC you got in the background there

I worked on these when they were new in the mid 1980's . They were more about hardware than software with DOS 2.0. When you bought one it came on.y with a motherboard and a monochrome video board. You have to buy and configure the machine as you wanted it, thus the name Personal Computer.

I've read those OAK VGA chips are pretty slow, then again I doubt the VGA speed matters at all on an 8088. I always do like the cards that offered the digital out and the analog VGA. Some of the later ATI VGA wonder cards have both and they can auto sence so no switch boxes to mess with. I have one in my 286.

Hm, MFM drives having drive select IDs like FDDs is kinda new to me, so thanks for the info. Yeah, I should have known that. Yet I didn't. Therefore, thumbs up!

I still have parts for a western digital model x 10mb drive, oddly a lot of the chips are labeled Proto

Another great video, looking forward to the next part. Convinced me that I need to take a look at my own 286. It's hdd is near dead though, makes awful noises. It's a bit of an odd machine actually as it's essentially a full 286 system on an isa card. There is no motherboard as such but just a riser with the floppy and ide controller on it which the 286 card plugs into and has space for 2 more 16bit cards.

Just amazing! 286 is my first pc !

Okay so do you like the green hdd led or the red one? lol

Nokia Data label spotted at 0:00. I believe those Alfaskop computers are exactly the same computers that were sold in Finland under locally better known brand MikroMikko, of which I also have a very similar looking sample in my storage. However, did not exactly know about such separate branding with these computers, even while this kind of things were far from uncommon. Any plans on featuring this unit in a future episode?

Man, I really need to get my XT 285 motherboard issues sorted out...

This is the computer on which I learned to program MS-COBOL.

After configuring the right drive type in CMOS, have you tried to check if there was any content on the drive? This could even be enough to boot from this drive.

4:27 > RGB connector For a second I thought ibm was that far ahead of its time

Nice video, as I see the graphic card 1024K has more memory that the machine itself 640K ?

Is it bad that I focus more on what's in the background than the front?

I used to HAVE one of these! I wish I hadn't given all my old computers away.

How did the OAK turn into a Trident during system diagnostics? :P

IDENTICAL?!?! But the hdd leds are different colors! ;D

did i spot an ESCOM tower? what specs does that have ? :-)

Why didn.t you use debug.exe program for formatting???

How do you know the type of the drive? 2 or 13? Where this information comes from? Thanks.

So, this leads to the question, what, besides aesthetics, is the difference between the XT 286 and the AT 286?

3:30 is it really 1.2Mb ? And not 360k?

my first pc - 80286

I have an OAK video card like this one, they are slow and uninteresting, the kinda cards you'd put in a 286.

This WD-25 disk drive was from XT system. You can recognize it by red led light (WD-25 disk drive for IBM XT-286 has yellow/orange led light) . Also XT systems are using straight cables, so this explains jumper position 1 and also different formatting (You had to perform low level format to use this drive). End of detective story ;)

If these XT 286 are just AT with a smaller motherboard, wouldn't that mean they're the very first so called "baby AT" computers since the baby AT form factor is the same as XT's form factor ?

To get the best performance of the harddisk, you need to find the best interleave.

14:49 seems you not only switched the HDD, but a VGA card too... Not good (

Actually, stason.org is an "empty shell". What you're referring to is actually "Total Hardware 1999". This site is composed of only .html files and have been replicated on several places. Here's a better replica than stason.org www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/ (without ads and with no modification to the text, because if you didn't notice, documentation of HDDs sometimes don't make much sense because there are more line breaks than originally).

I bet those cards have bad capacitors

Kids today would have heart failure

fiiiiiiiiiiirst

Meh, who cares about so old junk...