09/20/2017

Finally go around to firing up that 2nd unit. I found a used
USB floppy drive at a thrift store, had to purchase some disks
off ebay. The SETUP.EXE hosted here on this gopher hole was
invaluable to get the machine running. This unit seemed to have
some kind of secondary "EZ Bios" on it; the drive was setup
as a 300MB drive in the Compaq setup util, but DOS was able to
format 3 partitions using all 6GB of space that the drive had.

No NIC in this unit, but the screen is in better condition. I
think there are issues with caps in these, that causes vertical
lines on the gas plasma, but this unit didn't have that issue
at all. Clean screen all the way across (though, some very faded
bands that could be indicative of a future issue.) Also, taking
it apart, I noticed that it was exceptionally clean inside.

07/15/2017

Found another luggable on craigslist while I was visiting in
Portland, $20. Picked it up. A 386/20 model, but with a 3.5"
floppy instead of the 5.25" that my other one has. Will have to
work on getting a boot floppy going. Also need to crack it open
and see if it has an HDD. This one is branded "Network General"
with a tag marked "Network General Sniffer Network Analyzer."
I'm hopeful that it has a drive with whatever software it came
with still installed.

05/10/2017

The SETUP.EXE is critical. The CF is now working, but you have to
run the seup.exe first to setup the CMOS for the HDD type. I chose
type 38, which gave me 300mb (on my 16g CF card!). Since my
battery is dead, I have to run setup after leaving the computer
off for a while, but it still works after running it once (from
the floppy.)

There are sources on the www that say that the setup program is
useless and doesn't do anything important. That's not at all the
case.

05/02/2017

The HDD that was in here (ST3600A) had a slew of input/output errors
when I tried it in another machine. I'm going to try dropping in an
IBM DBOA-2528 528MB drive tomorrow (need an adapter) and if that
doesn't work I'm going to try a CF with adapter. I suppose the CF
would be faster (and CF came out in '94, so it would be in the era
of this machine)...

I should do the CF, and make it accessible externally so I can
transfer files more simply. This did come with an ethernet card
in the expansion, so that would be another "simple" way.

05/01/2017

Got the Compaq 386 Portable in the mail today. The HDD is not booting,
but the unit does boot from the 5.25" floppy. Fdisk isn't seeing the
HDD at all, though it does spin up.

Took the expansion unit off the back, and removed the rear of the case.
The HDD is not the original. When I have time, I'll see if my USB->IDE
adapter allows me to see the drive from another computer. Hopefully
the drive is simply bad, and not something else.

I ordered an adapter so I could use an older laptop drive in this thing.
We'll see how that works, it's a 500mb drive, so it should be doable.

The engineering on this thing is pretty decent for it's time. Having
most recently worked on updating my 8088, I'm happy to see that this
thing has 2 16-bit ISA slots (the 8-bit ISA cards were VERY hard to
find, and expensive!)

05/01/2017

Added a few files specific to Compaq's portables here. I need to snap
some of my own photos as well.