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Restoring a 386

Been messing around with this 30 year old 386 PC I found hidden under a shelf at work.

Been messing around with this 30 year old 386 PC I found hidden under a shelf at work.

The 40MB drive in it was still functional and had MS-DOS 6.20 on it along with some networking apps and the drivers for the network card in it.

Ended up needing to make a DOS boot disk on a 5.25" floppy to format the CF card I’m replacing the HDD with as the 3.5" floppy drive is connected as the B: drive and it will only boot from the A: drive which is the 5.25" drive. Luckily I happen to have a single 1.2MB 5.25" disk in my obsolete media collection and it still worked.

Once I got the CF card formatted and working I was able to back up all of the contents on the HDD. Then I wanted to see if I could get it connected to the internet since it had a 10mbps Ethernet adapter. After a bunch of trial and error I finally figured out the right combination of commands to get the network driver loaded and a telnet client working. Was able to connect to some actual BBSes and connect to the terminal for my media server.

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Last updated on Dec 30, 2022 11:08 EST
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