Today’s job involves rebuilding a PC based voice mail system that was struck by lightning. I was hoping to get lucky and find merely a bad power supply, but Thor was not smiling when he smote this old box and it looks like the mobo took the hit too. This is going to be so much fun! I don’t even know what software they’re running.
Here’s what I know:
- The computer is running DOS
- It has a four port Bicom modem card
- There are three ISA slots in use
- The hard drive spins up
I’ve had to put this job off from last week because it required digging into my hardware museum to find appropriate parts. After an hour of searching, I located a never used Epox EP-61BXA-M motherboard, 32 MB of PC100 RAM, and a Celeron 333 CPU. I tossed these into my cauldron, added a touch of AGP video and hit the power. Miraculously, the system booted and I was able to navigate the CMOS. I put an old hard disk on it and booted into Win98 with errors.
I decided to go ahead and burn the system in overnight to ensure all the parts were good, so I rebooted from my handy burn-in boot floppy and left it running. By morning, I had 200 error free passes.
I carried the parts into the office and finished reassembling the system. Along with the Bicom board, I had two jumperless ISA modems to install. I also moved the existing hard disk and floppy from the old system. 20 minutes with my screwdriver and I had her ready to boot.
When I fired the system back up, the first message I received was a CMOS checksum error. Fortunately, I keep a ready supply of CR2032 batteries for this little gotcha. I replaced the battery, booted in setup and reconfigured the CMOS to meet my needs. Most notably, I turned off PnP, and all onboard devices, including IRQs for the USB and VGA. No sense leaving something running that might conflict with the mystery modems from the original system.
One more reboot. I fondly watched MS-DOS load and then watched the voice mail system enable the Bicom board. It detected the board and configured it successfully, so I’m hoping I’ll have dialtone on all four ports. Without warning, I get the following message:
PANIC: [lpt.c:72]: prt_install
AX = 009F BX = 0048 CX = 0000 DX = 812B
SI = 0087 DI = FC46 DS = 8C13 ES = DDE0
IP = 0AB6 CS = 389E
Current Task = 05DE:02ED (-MAIN-)
System Halted
I didn’t need google to make the reasonable guess this software was expecting to find a parallel port active in the PC. I powered her down and entered the CMOS again to turn on the parallel port in SPP mode.
Sixty seconds later, I’m looking at the monitoring screen for the “pairtree Call Processing System Version 5.33f/2.27”. Rock.