Nekonomicon - Acquired a PS/2 Model 60 with Reply Corp PowerBoard planar replacement

aperezbios
From San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula
Who joined March 20, 2009, 9:40 p.m.

Wrote the following at March 7, 2017, 3:21 p.m...

I recently acquired an interesting beast, a PS/2 model 60 with a Reply Corporation-manufactured, Socket 3 MCA Planar motherboard replacement, the PowerBoard 60. It came with no floppy drive, RAM, or CPU, but it came to life once the requisite components were installed. I found a replacement 6 volt '223' Energizer CMOS battery replacement at my local electronics store, installed it,

After enumerating the RAM, I get the following message: "Invalid configuration. Please run the setup program". I am assuming this only lives on a floppy disk, as none of the common non-PS/2 key combinations get me into anything resembling a BIOS. I'm aware of PS/2 style "POS/Programmable Option Select", but have no personal experience with it.

I'm now looking for one of two things...either a genuine (working or not) PS/2 1.44MB FDD unit, or some documentation on how to wire up a replacement from the 40-pin IBM-proprietary IDC floppy+power connector, to a standard legacy IDC PC floppy connector.

Photos at https://goo.gl/photos/XYMGDPU5CgTmyhck9

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/R/REPLY-CORPORATION-486-POWERBOARD-MODEL-60-65-80.html

pentium
From Kamloops, BC
Who joined Aug. 28, 2006, 6:29 p.m.

Wrote the following at March 7, 2017, 4:47 p.m...

Alas, you are correct in that you need a special floppy. All of the Microchannel machines needed what was called the Reference Diskette to self-configure when the battery was changed or you added/removed boards. The diskette is different for every planar but MCA machines are well documented so if you can't find it on MCAmafia then you will find it on one of the other MCA oriented sites.
Personally I've never tried subbing in a regular PC floppy drive so I do not have the pinout for the adapter harness (because IBM's PS/2 34 pin floppy interface is NOT THE SAME AS THE USUAL 34 PIN FLOPPY PINOUT) but others successfully have.

Edited: I quickly looked up the Powerboard 60/65/80 and came across this page which seems to have the reference diskette image.

<-------- A very happy forum member.

ibmfiles
Who joined Oct. 29, 2016, 4:51 p.m.

Wrote the following at April 7, 2017, 10:25 p.m...

Get either a mitsubishi or sony IBM PS/2 FDD and replace the SMT capacitors. Then away you go.
http://ibmfiles.com/pages/ps2capacitors.htm

DO NOT purchase an ALPS one, they have a catastrophic flaw of the read head becoming unglued and it's near impossible to realign correctly.