This motherboard has issues. Let's try to fix it! 

A lot of people think, that a repair is like you'd always know what the issues is. And in reality you sit there with a multi-meter and an oscilloscope in your hands and measure signals, desperately trying to follow some ideas, what it could be. In my opinion, the most important tool for this kind of work is patience, just a lot of patience :D Anyway, this is a very interesting case indeed, I'm very curious about the outcome, but unfortunately I have also no clue. If I would see such a behavior, I would probably end up with a logic analyzer on IRQ, DAK and DRQ pins and watching if there is something happening, what makes sense. And btw. as I saw the XTIDE card the wrong way around a second before you turned on the PC I was literally screaming "Adrian! No!" at my screen. You know why? Because I made the very same mistake just couple of weeks ago. I hate the symmetry of that card and I was almost doing that stuff couple of times already, but I always was able to notice it in the last second. Well, until that last time. Now I screwed a bracket on one side, which totally doesn't fit, but at least next time I should not insert the card the other way around. Unfortunately in my case not only the EPROM, but also the 74HTC573 were both dead after getting 12V. And I had no replacement parts at hand..... Thank you very much, just as always very entertaining and educative too!

Adrian, put the bracket on the xtide card. You will never make this mistake again. Awesome content btw!

Hello everyone!! There is a follow-up video to this one, so once you finish this one, go check out the follow-up. It will answer many of your questions.

“Parts scan”, now THAT brought back some memories! One time when our car was in the shop, my mother was very impressed at the “high tech scan” they were going to do to find a gremlin. She was told something like “we’ll have to run a parts scan, it’ll take a couple days, and that will hopefully turn-up the culprit”. Good to know they were just desperately replacing parts and probably lots of swearing!

The machine timer IRQ is required for BIOS and DOS to work so that's why it hangs without the PIC. The DMAC drives the DRAM refresh so it definitely wouldn't work properly at all if it were damaged. As for the NEC PIC working at higher clocks, it's a CMOS part while the Intel is NMOS.

I had exactly the same Turbo XT board with 10MHz V20 in 1989, my first PC! I remember spending hours and hours just mastering marvels of DOS3.3 and dwelling into Sokoban feat!

I had an issue with a similar symptoms on an XT of mine -- everything looked okay, but as soon as MFM hard drive or a floppy tried to read things, it would read garbage. Turned out that one of the 74xxx-s in the address decode logic of a MDA card would generate a small pulse on an output line whenever its input changed. The glitch didn't disrupt regular memory accesses, but affected the DMA transfers. Not sure what the morale is -- but perhaps it's also something disrupting the DMA transfers while being minor enough not to affect I/O cycles generated by the CPU.

I have to admit, I've enjoyed this episode of Adrian's Parts Cannon.

Bit of a stab in the dark but there should be a 74LS670 that holds the upper part of the DMA address (the lower 64K is under control of the 8237). Maybe that's bad (in whole or part). As other have pointed out the DMA must at least partially be working otherwise the DRAM refresh would fail.

Good to see people saving vintage clones.

“ I was about to end the video here”.. thank you for continuing!!

My first thought is to check connections to the interrupt controller (as you mentioned at the end) and any buffers on there, as the fact that accessing A: throws out Ctrl-C as if the keyboard is doing something kinda... feels like the interrupt signalling is getting screwed up somehow.

Shotgunning parts is a valid troubleshooting technique. It's what you do when you run out of other ideas. I have fixed a LOT of equipment by swapping parts out.

Take a drink every time Adrian says "Turbo" 😆

This is one of my favourite videos of all time. Failure is just as important as success. Thank you for sharing it.

That BIOS is the ancestor of the BIOS you replaced it with.

Because of the battery leakage you mentioned I would start testing the ISA slot connectors. But we saw with your cool post card that the IRQ worked. So check the 74xxx chips connected to the dma controller would be my next step.

kudos on you including the gaffe with the XTIDE, and not just being ashamed and editing it out. But yea, see if you can't put a bracket on there, even a 3D printed one.

I wonder about the big clue many seem to be missing (or I missed them) are the spurious "Ctrl+C" (and once changing color) it might be a red herring as Adrian tried to eliminate that error. My guess is a messed up latch chip on the address bus, the same guess as many others. Oh, btw, great youtubing calling your own video terrible, that made me laugh. Never change Adrian, keep being honest, it is so refreshing.

It's a bit of a long shot, but I'd check the caps, including the ceramic ones, to see if any of them are dead shorts.

Ah, those rubbon shirts. They are tricky!

I would absolutely love to see the original Duke Nukem 1 from 1991 run on one of these on one of your repair videos, or any 80's DOS game! Been watching these videos for a while, and is pure therapy; keep up the excellent work! :)

Well done, you did ur best and I know you will fix it x

Sorry for the interruption, small screen. You seem to have covered just about everything easy. Now you can focus on the hard. Might ask your viewers for documentation. Well, good luck on your mission, Adrian. Hope you don't have to part it ( out ).

Happy new year Adrian!!

So long as there is a mystery, it's always a good vid - lol -. If you have a piece of 5/8"/16mm board to put under the MB, it should lift the MB enough to clear the low hanging metal part of cards.

Kind of amazed it gets even that far without an interrupt controller present

The one thing that you mentioned that you didn't follow up on was checking for damaged traces on the board. :)

The only thing that I can think of is to try to change the IRQ and/or DMA for the floppy and see if that helps. Also, you could pull a "trial and error" approach to the DIP switches and document your findings. You may advertently unlock the faster speed of the V20 CPU. Being that there are 8 switches, there are about 512 possible combinations maximum.

Love all of your content! So informative

I've been a PC technician since the 1990's after the XT/286/386 era and there isn't anything wrong with what you tried.

Hehe, Turbo XT. I remember those. People thought they were the nutz. Amazing thing is, 30-40 years later, Arduinos have more power in about the size of the original 8080 or 8086's

Test the floppy as the B drive. Change the floppy switch/connector.

Another vote for bad or bridged trace, those Ctrl+Cs look like the FDC is asserting the IRQ1 line somehow (pin 19 on the PIC), which is the keyboard controller interrupt. Might be worth getting a scope on that. Also the interrupt vectors in the first 1kb of RAM could be screwed up, might be worth dumping those with debug and making sure the entry for IRQ6 isn’t pointing somewhere weird.

I realise you've already fixed the problem, but I wanted to make a guess before I see the solution and see if I'm right! I think perhaps the Programmable Timer chip or PIT. It generates interrupt 08 and that didn't seem to be working. Interrupt 08 is important for floppy access as DOS uses it for turning off the motor amongst some other things... Now to watch the second video to see if I was right!

IIRC to change the speed on my old machine it was ctrl+alt+up/down arrows. You could always try that.

I would test all the ISA slots first. Then make sure the floppy drive actually works. Sometimes drives will fail just sitting on a shelf.

Haven't a clue what the issue is, but sometimes the "parts cannon" can often yeild some interesting results, even if unintended or not fixing the issue at hand... :)

Looked like it was thinking you have a single sided floppy drive. It's been a few years, but I worked in the factory making the IBM PC from 1981 to 1987. Interesting channel, but it seems to only have a single crystal oscillator (color burst frequency divided by 3) so it will not have a turbo mode. 8259C is not compatible, we had a memorable batch with those. Interrupt controller is used in memory refresh (along with the 8237 DMA controller). It's not possible to work without the 8259 or 8237.

It's sad that the Kickstart board left off the IRQ0-2 lights. Yes, on a functional system IRQ0 will always be lit (18.2 triggers per second from the timer), and IRQ1 will light up every time you press a key. But the reason for a diagnostic board is that you might NOT have a working system. IRQ2 on the PC and XT was available for use, then it became the slave IRQ line for the second PIC in the AT and above. 3 and 4 are COM, 7 is parallel. So 5 and 6 were available for expansion cards, one taken by the hard drive and the other by the floppy. IBM set up DMA line 0 for RAM refresh. Seems perfect since it can count through memory and it negotiates with the CPU for control of the bus already, and places addresses and MRQ/RDs on the bus whenever the CPU gives the all-clear. Timer channel 1 generates the DMA request pulses for this DMA line. So the timer must also be working properly to boot a functional system. The ^C appears when the BIOS writes into a spot (0x0040:0071) that says you've pressed CTRL-BRK. DOS samples this when it uses its I/O functions and responds with the ^C that you see. It then resets that location. So if you see ^C's happening a lot, it's a good bet that either the memory chip in charge of that location is dead, or the BIOS is constantly setting that flag. One possibility would be to use the real XT BIOS chip in it. It sets the break flag and clears the keyboard buffer when it detects the scroll-lock key while CTRL is pressed, and only in that circumstance. Perhaps that other BIOS has other occasions where it will set the flag? Orrrrrrrrr..... perhaps the DMA controller's address lines are not all making it to the appropriate address pins at the memory chips, and DMA-based disk access is overwriting the BIOS data area? Possibly even the interrupt table (leading to the system lockups), and possibly the break flag location is corrupted because DMA refresh doesn't always touch that portion of memory? I don't know how this clone did things, but the 8237A DMA controller outputs the high 8 bits of the address on its data in lines. So it's necessary for those to be buffered so that the data lines can be open for the memory transfer. The PC/XT uses a 74LS373 chip (U11) for that purpose. If its analogue on this board died or were not fully connected to the address traces, pandemonium would result. Oh, and one last thing: There is an addressable latch (LS670) that stores the top 4 bits of the destination address. It is mapped into port space at 0x80+channel, off the top of my head. The DMA controller can only address 16 bits, so you need this extra 4 bits to make the entire 1MB address space accessible, in 64K banks. So it's also critical for this chip to be working properly. And another edit: IMD uses DMA and IRQ! However, it uses a clean 64K-aligned page for its buffer, so it must always be writing a nonzero value to the page register. DOS is likely loading into page 0. So that makes the LS373 the likely culprit. If you run DEBUG from your XT-IDE card, then load a sector into various locations at 1000:xxxx using the "L" command, where would that sector actually end up?

I once put an EPROM chip into a NIC backwards. When the computer powered on, the EPROM created a lot of smoke and there was a hole in the center of the chip. Luckily, the NIC was fine (the EPROM was dead, putting one in the right way worked ok).

Love the mobo repair videos the best

Maybe check the jumper switches with your meter to see if they are actually connecting? You might also put the files on the C drive and run some dos based checks from there i.e is the rest of the system working apart from the floppy drive.

Feels like a dip switch to me but idk... Without stating the obvious here, you are sure the ribbon cable to the drive is fault free, correct? Back in the day, I would have thrown in the towel on this one, a long time ago! Props to you, for your persistence!!!

Interesting that you get Ctl-C on the screen when doing disk access. Maybe see which interrupt fires when you type a key and see if that same one is activated by disk access? Or maybe scope the serial data coming from the keyboard and see if there is a glitch on it when you access the disk. Maybe some other signal is shorted to it?

I had a very similar issue on a 5150. In my case the problem turned out to be with the 74LS logic around the DMA controller. Specifically, the address latch LS373 in U18 was bad. So data from the floppy controller would end up at the wrong address in memory. But everything else was good. The DMA controller was good, and all the control signals were good. The BIOS was oblivious to the carnage. As far as it was concerned, a good sector of data was transferred from the floppy controller to memory.

I remember buying once a 8087 numeric coprocessor for my XT with 8088 processor. Not a lot of programmes made use of it, though. MathCad got quicker.

Very odd... I am having very similar problems with the AT&T PC6300 that I have been working on recently... except the floppy was initially working.

Hello Sir! Great video! Here is a suggestion for you. Since you are able to seet the disk work with your diagnostic card, not sure which one, I believe it's a BIOS/software issue and not a hardware problem. See if you can find a clone ROM image. I know you made another one, but I don't think it was correct. It shouldn't detect Turbo mode of you don't have any of the parts and crystal. Just a thought.

On the cpu comment. I personally seen a bad cyrix 6x86 not accept a windows 95 product key 😳. That was an interesting one to figure out

Check continuity from the slots to the other components.. Start with the DMA. You said there was corrosion before.

Try changing the dip switches for the number of floppy drives in the computer.

Always nice to see those old boards. Btw., is there a cheap case solution for old boards? I have a old Commodore PC motherboard but no case for it. I guess newer ATX cases won't fit, even when modified with extra holes for the screws. Ebay prices are out of hand, and I would be happy with a kind of hacky solution.

I think you were onto something with the potentially damaged traces. I think you should try checking continuity on the parts that are acting up to see if there's any problems there.

I think the issue is that it's very old. 19:22 "DIR a colon", what is DIR? I hope it means wash. 19:28, "DIR a colon enter." No bro, exit only!

@Adrian This was not a terrible video. That board has a squirrelly problem. You might have been right when you suggested that it might not have the correct BIOS installed. It keeps detecting a gameport and there isn't one. This is my guess as well. Maybe try to find the right BIOS?

give those dip switches a squirt of contact cleaner and operate them up and down a few times, then re set and try again , may be iffy

I'd start checking DMA lines to the ISA sockets. IRQ as well. Check those traces! (And I'm sorry.)

You said about the fpu when checking the switches. Was it sent as one being present compared to the diagram?

try this adrian DTK PIM Turbo 10-V01 or DTK PIM TURBO PC/XT MOTHERBOARD 8 MHZ

What I know is : On some motherboards (even way newer , like 486 class, but at the beginning or pre - Plug and Pray ) some interrupts were available only on specific slots (Like: the signals for some reasons were not getting there), so in order to use a controller with specific interrupt you needed to use specific group of slots, and it was a matter of juggling the locations of the cards between the slots to make them all work. I remember groups of 4 interrupts per group of slots, for example, the VGA card was getting errors and not working properly when putted in the last 4 slots of the motherboard. On one of my machines there was literally a one single sequence of cards that was working properly and without conflicts, other orders were causing problems or freezing the whole machine. What it may suggest is : either some signals may be missing on the ISA slots (corrosion, it may be on some of them), or the controller must be in a specific slot / or specific order with other cards. Software access may just override the whole problem there.

Did you try the Floppy controller(s) in different slots? Move the cards around in the various slots (all slots are equal, right? :) ) and see if the slot that had the bad battery is the problem...

I have a similar board, it's power connector is not the same as the usual P8/P9 connector. Is yours having problems fitting there. Could it be something needs different wiring, or -5v.

I question the DIP switches. If the motherboard cannot be positively identified, there's always a chance that a revision was made to the switches you need to use. I think this is unlikely, but still a possibility. You seem to have covered everything else quite thoroughly.

on commodore PC they use ctrl D or T or N i think for the 3 speeds, so maybe test with an letter and not only numbers. Also on the commodore PC there is an app speed.exe to set the speed in dos

Interesting, if you try to access to the drive whitout floppy, does it says error disk missing or not ready? I would look for dip switches informations, i had a similar problem on an 1989 computer with 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 drives, it was pain to find the correct configuration to access to both drives.there is no dip switches on the floppy controller?

fun video. cheers mate

I am in the same group with one of your other commenters it sounds like a bad dram i know it sounds silly though sometimes a bad ram can get past the best ram check.

I have turbo clone and mine have two oscillators one is 24 MHz (divided by 3 it is 8 MHz, 4,77*3=14,xxx). I would try to use older Dos The schematics are in the manual at the end but You have to check if it your version.

how about using the chip tester to test some of the chips if it can?

What happens if you set it to 2x floppies in the dip switches and connect another floppy drive? does it work?

Check floppy drive jumpers for correct channel and make sure floppy cable is not one of those that flip the select lines on floppy connectors.

disk 1/0 jumpers on the floppy drive itself nxt to ribbon skt ?

Maybe trace the dip switch connections for the floppy drive back to where they connect? and verify the dip switch itself isn't faulty?

Is it possible to change the DMA channel and/or the IRQ to see if something else would work? Other than that, it does smell like some crosstalk somewhere with the ^C or some strange broken/partial high ohm trace.

with the text colour change, that would suggest memory issues, faulty ram or addressing issues.

FYI when you Google the turbo bios you put bios 98 instead of 89

Is there a 7400 series chip on the board that handles DMA?

Any news on checking the board for corrosion and/or cut traces?

Did the bus clock match the cpu clock? Should be the same.. if not It could be the issue. All the timing on the board on xt uses one clock reference. The nec cpu could be one part of the tweaks done..

You check the traces on the bus? And the connector

Could those control codes that show up be any indication? The KB and floppy should get their own IRQ, right, but is it possible that through some means (configuration, corroded traces, I dunno, line noise?) that they're stomping on each other somehow?

'rubbon on the microphone" ❤️

Just a quick note on the ROMs: I don’t recall watching the video about the laser xt, but the discrepancy in ROM sizes between this machine and the XT probably comes down to ROM resident BASIC. IIRC, IBM’s had the BIOS routines plus BASIC in ROM, whereas a lot of close just implemented the (reverse engineered) BIOS routines. On the PC and early XT’s (both had 5 ROM sockets) If using 8KB ROM’s, the first ROM was BIOS, and then 4 additional 8KB ROMs held BASIC. The final empty ROM socket was probably reserved for some type of additional option ROM. (If using a larger eprom type, you could probably cram everything into a smaller ROM set). Later models only had 2 sockets, and my guess is that IBM, rather than sourcing one 8KB ROM and one 32KB ROM, just went with two 32 KB ROMs (one holding the ~8KB of BIOS routines, and the other having the ~ 32KB of BASIC). My guess is that on this clone, you probably had to pay extra to have Microsoft Basic (IBM Basic was licensed from Microsoft), which would have been fitted by the dealer as “option ROM”. As the original IBM BIOS was only around 8KB, my guess is the clone BIOS is very similarly sized. It’s be interesting to dump an IBM official BIOS and this clone BIOS, and compare the disassembled output to see how similar they actually are. I vaguely recall (as a kid) reading articles about IBM legally chasing after clone manufacturers who’d simply copied their BIOS outright.

is the chip labeled "PC turbo 89" supposed to be offset 2 pins to the left?

The difference to the car industry is that in the car industry you make the customer pay for every part that you mindlessly replace during the "parts scan".

Wondering about the keyboard ... looks like an AT with the LEDs and F keys at the top. Is it a switched XT/AT?

That's very interesting that you can't see dislikes also, I was under the impression the creator can see them just not viewers. Also there are extensions for most browsers that show the dislike count again!

Bad DMA traces (DMARQ/ACK)can cause issues. Many floppy diagnostic and disk copy utils used PIO instead of DMA (in order to defeat copy protect). Originally, DMA was used for hard drive - usually DMA 3 but I may be wrong. DMA 0 is required on XT machines for DRAM refresh. Of course, SoundBlaster usually used DMA 1. DMA became less used because it was limited to less than 5MHz, even on AT machines into the 486/Pentium era. 3com made their ISA busmaster cards which did DMA without the motherboard DMAC because of this performance issue. Of course, PCI busmaster spelt the end of the DMAC.

Is that IC straightner still available on ebay?

i feel the problem is either a bad ic near the leakage or a bad trace

that is a precise turbo XT board

I love your channel!

Could it be a motherboard manufacturing error and bad quality control?

Have you got the MS-DOS version from the machine / hard disk it was installed in?

Others have stated (and a few too many comments to review them all) but my theory is the battery leakage damaged the interrupt traces from the sockets to to PIC. The slots are wired in parallel right? So any diagnostic cards would see the signal but not the controller. It’s sitting waiting on a signal that never comes? Could be the lines floating are causing the Ctrl+C (SIGINT according to Microsoft)

Back when I was fixing PCs for a living this would be the point where I would inform the customer that this PC needs a new motherboard 😃 but seriously I am not sure that a damaged trace would be the cause, since I assume that would affect the expansion bus and cause issues with any other cards you may be using. My guess would be a BIOS compatibility related issue.

Is there a bad trace? Tune in next week when we hear our dynamic hero say: "It freaking works!"

You can go full 200% on "replace another part" path. Yes, this is not the best strategy for diagnostics, but A: it will absolutely eventually work and B: you will gain even more experience at desoldering stuff =) You can even replace parts in bulks, like 4 logic ICs at a time.

I noticed the error checking ROM said there was a math coprocessor error. Yet you set the dip switches to on, on. Was that to disable or enable?