dml@wam.umd.edu (Douglas M. Lindsey ) (05/20/91)
My PS/2 Model 30 (original, 8086-based), recently suffered damage to the serial port as a result of a lightning strike to the telphone lines. I ran diags on it, and got the cheery "Replace System Unit" message. The floppy drives in the computer have been flaky for some time, and I recall reading that there is little hope of finding replacement 720K drives of the same type. Does that also mean that it will be difficult or impossible to find a replacement motherboard for the machine from IBM or from somewhere else? Do I have any real hope of salvaging this machine, or should I bite the bullet and begin looking for a replacement? It seems theoretically possible that I might be able to upgrade it to a 30-286 with a replacement motherboard and two new floppies. Has anyone done this, and do you have any estimates on how much it might cost? Any advice would be appreciated. -Doug -- -------------------------------------------------------------- I is a shiny happy people.
terrih@mcnc.org (Terri W. Hardwick) (05/20/91)
In article <1991May20.015223.14914@wam.umd.edu> dml@wam.umd.edu (Douglas M. Lindsey ) writes: >My PS/2 Model 30 (original, 8086-based), recently suffered damage to the serial >port as a result of a lightning strike to the telphone lines. I ran diags on >it, and got the cheery "Replace System Unit" message. > >...find a replacement motherboard for the machine from IBM or from somewhere > > -Doug Typically, the only thing damaged would be the serial port circuitry. The cheapest alternative would be to just purchase a microchannel serial port board. Last summer we had a lightning strike near an auxilary office building, and all our communications lines were buried copper. We lost serial ports on every terminal and PS2 in that building, as well as communcations ports on the VAX and HP computers and other communcations devices in the main building. Needless to say, we switched to fiber immediately. Installing a serial board was the only thing I had to do to the PS2's. terrih@mcnc.org