Help with NEC 286 setup

What type of NEC is it? I picked up an old NEC APCIV a few years back with
no 3.5" drive or setup information. It has NO BIOS/CMOS program in ROM; I
use a piece of software called "gsetup31" which allows access to the
system's CMOS settings (changing the disk drives, hard disks and memory
settings). You can find gsetup31 on ftp.wustl.edu. BTW 720K disk drives
can usually read but not write to 1.44Mb disks. There should be no problem
swapping the 720K for a 1.44Mb disk drive provided you alter the system
settings - swapping the A: and B: drives will similarly not work without
running gsetup31 or another setup program.

Alex.

--

Phone: (0412) 992 610                 Address: PO Box 6399
Email: Remove leng from my address to reply    North Sydney Shoppingworld
ICQ  : 514 @pager.mirabilis.com              NSW. Australia. 2060
Read the Apple II Emulator Resources Guide! http://purl.org/net/Apple2

There are a couple if issues here.

First thing is that many 80286 machines had BIOS incapable of supporting
1.44 meg diskettes--this is not a problem generally for a brand name machine
as the manufacturer should be able to provide an updated BIOS chip.  OTOH,
that machine's old enough that NEC might not have any in stock.  If you
can't, the alternative would be to obtain a diskette controller with its own
ROM--another workaround would be to put in an IDE interface and an LS-120.

Second is that most 80286 machines did not have setup in ROM, needing a
diskette instead.  A quick look at the support section on the NEC Web site
<www.nec.com> revealed that they have setup disk images available for
download for a variety of their machines, which makes it _very_ likely that
yours falls into this category.  You might want to go over there and see if
you can find the right disk images to download.

--

--John

Reply to jclarke at eye bee em dot net.

It sounds like the floppy controller might be bad.  You should definitely
check in the BIOS though. It could very possibly be a setting that just
needs to be changed.  As far as getting into your BIOS, the delete key is
used sometimes.  It sounds like you've tried the other possibilities.  Make
sure you try both "alt" and "ctrl" combinations with the "F" keys.  As a
last resort try taking out the BIOS battery and putting it back in.  This
will often force the computer to go into setup mode on the next startup.  I
did see an old Compaq 486 one time that you needed a special boot disk to
get into the BIOS.

Good Luck

*** Due to my efforts to reduce the amount of SPAM I receive,
you must remove the "EOD" from my address to reply.***

Henry
bombt @EODbellatlantic.net