The fact that you have a Western Digital 286 tells me a lot. It also means you have a FMDC board and the machine was originally a SX15. It needed a floppy to boot and ran DOS 5. I did convert one such machine to a hard drive but it was a chore as the software had to be pieced together. Besides the 4 AA batteries there is a CMOS battery on the mother board. It lets the mother board remember what kind of floppy it has, what are the hard drive parameters for the hard drive if present, time, date, boot sequence, etc. I believe you need to press the F1 key (it in the maintenance manual) while it was booting and get to the CMOS so they can be set. If the battery is dead, this may need to be done every time the control is booted. A bootable floppy will have command.com on it as well as 2 hidden files. The SX floppy should be bootable and should load the machine software to RAM memory. The DX floppy is to load a hard drive with the necessary files. Most DX floppies are NOT meant to load the files that a FMDC board needs. DX machines have BMDC boards and communicate to the mother board through the backplane. The WD board communicates to the FMDC board with a RS232 comm port. Like I said, for a hard drive the software had to be pieced together.
George W.  |