Need Some help with a Vintage PC restoration - Sharp PC-8081

[Essex2Visuvesi]

Hi All
Just joined this forum so that I might share with you my journey with a retro 386 luggable PC im working on
It's a Sharp PC-8081 "Portable" Colour Computer

Like this one here:-


Currently having some issues getting past the BIOS setup screen, The floppy drive was borked (Epson SMD-440 3.5 1.44MB)
Now I've replaced this with 2 different known good 3.5" floppy drives and both give the same error
"drive 0 seek failure"
I have ensured that the BIOS is correctly configured, but there are a number of DIP switches on the board, but I'm unable to find out what they do as I have no manual and the searches of t'interwebs have proven fruitless.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Dragon Mech]

welcome to our forums.
that is a really nice piece of history you have there.
i don't know anything about it, but i will try to help you as best as i can.
is there a sticker on the case with a model number?
also, could you upload at least one picture of your computer?

[Essex2Visuvesi]

I'll get some pics up later.
So I've manage to get it to boot from floppy after having to rework one of the floppy drives. It needed to be changed from D1 to D0
The Old Quantum Pro-Drive 80AT hard drive has bad sectors as has been binned.... I now have a curious problem with my IDE to CF card
I can format the drive and copy back and forth between floppy and CF, but when I put the CF card into another machine, I can see the drive and folder structure but no files.
If I copy files onto the CF from my newer machine, the DOS machine won't see them. All very weird

[Essex2Visuvesi]

Hi All
Some pics as promised

[Essex2Visuvesi]

And a couple more

I've managed to find a couple of magazine reviews and and advert (these things were ruinously expensive!)

[Hot Trout]

That is quite a rare little 386. A good project to restore.
Thanks for sharing

[Essex2Visuvesi]

No Problem
We've made a little progress after installing a disk manager program although it seems a little hit & miss as to wether it detects the IDE-CF adaptor on boot
It does seem tho that every time I pull the CF card and put it into another machine this one wont read it again.

[Dragon Mech]

may suggest that you format you CF drive with 32K allocation units.
if your CF drive is larger than 2GB, you will want to create one or more 2GB partitions on the drive and format them as FAT (not FAT 32).
you should be able to do this on a windows NT based OS ( win2k, xp, vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10) with the Disk management tool (diskmgmt.msc)

[Essex2Visuvesi]

Thanks for the tips
I have figured out whats going on with the card
I needed to run a disk overlay program to properly format the disk. (ontrack) The 2Gb SD card now reads as 2GB
On first power on the computer gives an error that it cannot initialise the drive. I think this is because the Hard drive selection is limited by type and there is no way to manually set the CHS
However if I do a soft reboot (CTRL-ALT-DEL) it then boots correctly.
All seems to be running fine now as long as I dont try to copy files from my Mac as this makes the CF card unreadable in DOS
Soundblaster compatible ISA card has been fitted and is working perfectly and a 387 Co-Processor has been found and purchased on eBay
Now to find some RAM as it only has the 640k base plus 1Mb so the gaming options are limited

I'll also look at replacing the 2 60mm cooling fans as they are extremely noisy, even after I have cleaned and oiled them

[nightshade]

wow since its almost a year to the day since the last post I wonder if the op got it working ......