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| I purchased my OLIVETTI M24 "Personal Computer" in the late 80's after I became friends with a couple of computer technicians from a local university. They happened to mention that the university was upgrading its computers to the latest model - the OLIVETTI M240 - and that they had bought all the old computers as a job lot. They explained that they were not all functioning correctly but that by collecting all the good bits together they could rebuild a number of fully functioning computers. I had the foresight to realise that computers were the way technology was bound to proceed, and as I did not want to be left behind in the move towards this type of office technology, I placed my order. And so it was that a week or so later one of my friends turned up at my house, unloaded and set up the computer, ran through the operating basics, and relieved me of a quite large sum of money for the time ( £245.00 ) Though you have to remember that the upto date computers at the time (386 / 486? ) were selling for £1200 - £1400 so It was cheap in comparison. I purchased a STAR 24 pin dot matrix printer which had the option of a number of different font styles and colour printing using a colour ribbon. I used this combination for a number of years for all my word processing and data record keeping and it proved a reliable tool, never crashing or faltering in any way. However all good things eventually come to an end and I carefully packed my computer up in readyness to move house in October 1997 but the house move was delayed, not actually happening until February 1998 and then it was some time before I unpacked it again and DISASTER!! when I switched it on it came up with NON SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR Not to worry I thought I have a system disk that came with the computer ( all those years ago ) but on inserting and rebooting I got the same message. I was stumped! I have a friend who has two sons, both into computers in a big way,in fact the eldest had just started a university course in computing. So the PC was packed up and delivered to his house and it disappeared into the youngest sons bedroom. My friend delivered regular updates on the state of the PC on our regular meetings in the pub. And the investigations gradually revealed the following:- The system disk is a list of recovered files - they have all lost their attributes. ( I should have checked it years ago ) The onboard battery had run down. The battery will not now recharge The BIOS has lost its settings because of the dead battery. The BIOS has reset itself to its default settings and will not access the information on the disk. The disk will need reformatting and a replacement operating system installing. I now have a working PC with DOS 3.3 on it, but I have a problem with my floppy drive "A" Because my BIOS reset to default it thinks it is a 360kb 5 1/4" floppy, when in reality it is a 720kb 3 1/2" drive, which means it will only access the first 360kb of a disk. I have now installed a replacement battery but the BIOS still does not recognise that power has been restored I remember being told many years ago that you have to alter some jumper settings to reset the BIOS but cannot find any instructions on what to do. When I can get it working correctly I intend to try and use ELKS, a stripped down version of LINUX for 8086 and similar systems that is currently under development. |
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