olivetti M316: 386 laptop

Posted on 25.03.2021 by domi

olivetti M316

Year: 1989
CPU: Intel 80386 SX
RAM: 1MB
Disk: 40MB
Floppy: 1.44MB
OS: MSDOS 6.22
Ports: serial, parallel, vga, mouse (PS/2), keyboard (mini-DIN?)
Special: 1 ISA slot (Intel NIC)
Screen: black & white

I cannot even remember when and where I got this beautiful machine. It was stored in the attik for the last 20 years and I rediscovered it just recently.
CMOS battery was dead and the CMOS data seamed corrupt: it showed a 5 digit year…
It booted up just fine and I made a backup of the harddisk over FTP (DOS TCP stack with mTCP and an Intel EtherExpress 16 network card).
But soon after it didn’t detect the harddisk anymore. A few reboots later it was running again, but the harddisk seemed to have issues and many broken sectors. Way too late I found out that the corrupt CMOS got the wrong HDD type and the disk itself wasn’t actually broken.
This computer only knows three disk types and sizes:

  • 20MB: Type 1, 615 Cylinders, 4 Heads, 17 Sectors (Conner CP3024)
  • 40MB: Type 2, 980 Cylinders, 5 Heads, 17 Sectors (Conner CP3044/46)
  • 100MB: Type 3, 776 Cylinders, 8 Heads, 33 Sectors (Conner CP30104/06)

But the CMOS had type 61, which doesn’t even exist. So it had some random cylinder/head/sector counts and everything seemed broken.
I tried to find the Olivetti configuration utility, as those old PCs don’t have a full featured BIOS yet. I didn’t find a working copy, but I found a general CMOS configuration tool, which fixed the wrong disk type and repaired the CMOS data.

Now I had to replace the old CMOS battery. It’s a 3.6V rechargable battery, consisting of three coin cells in series. The middle one was broken and leaking.
Opening this old brittle case with some hidden screws was a challange in itself, you can read about it here.
After disconnecting the CMOS battery, the next boot will show the “built-in set-up”. This is some kind of mini BIOS. Press F1 to set the time, F2 for the date (four digit year! y2k compatible!) and F3 for the disk type. Press space to toggle through the three disk types. Use Enter to confirm each selection and again after the last one. Don’t use Esc to exit or the settings won’t be saved.

  • Conner CP3044 40MB HDD
  • CMOS battery: 3.6V (rechargable)
  • disk type 01-20Mb
  • disk type 02-40Mb
  • disk type 03-100Mb
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create floppy disk images on MacOS

Posted on 07.02.2021 by domi

I want to archive old floppy disks for archive.org. the easiest way is to create a floppy image, which also includes the boot records on bootable floppies.
the image then can be opened in DOS box or on MacOS (just rename to .dmg an open in Finder).

diskutil list
(find device of the floppy, ie /dev/disk2)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 bs=512 conv=noerror,sync of=myfloppy.img

and for CDs / DVDs

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
sudo dd if=/dev/disk2 bs=2048 conv=sync,notrunc of=myISO.iso
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iCloud Calendar on MacOS not responding

Posted on 19.05.2020 by domi

I just had an issue with the calendar on MacOS (Mojave) not responding right after opening the window. The calendars are synced over iCloud to an iPhone and an iPad. I had no issues on the iPad, the iPhone however would freeze occasionally while adding new events in the calendar.

I saw other symptons on MacOS in the activity monitor: the processes CalNCService, suggestd, AppleSpell and CalendarAgent were at 100% CPU (on a core each).

I deleted the cache files, calendar plists, etc and nothing helped.
When I disabled the iCloud calendar sync, the issue stopped and the calendar app worked!
So the issue was clearly related to some data in the iCloud calendar.

I installed Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar Add-on and connected it with iCal/ICS to iCloud to see what’s going on.
To get access to an iCloud calendar with iCal/ICS it has to be enabled on the specific calendar. The easiest way to do this is on icloud.com: click the sharing icon on the calendar, select ‘public calendar’ and copy the displayed URL.

Open the calendar in Thunderbird and add a new one, select ‘network’, then iCalendar (ICS) and paste the iCloud URL.
Now you can search for corrupted event entries and delete them.
In my case I had an event with a corrupted date, so it displayed it from 1974 to 2050!
But I couldn’t delete it, as iCloud had an issue with that entry, too.

The solution was to export the whole calendar to an ICS file in Thunderbird (make sure you export to an ICS file and not a html), then import it again into a local calendar (still in Thunderbird). Locally I was able to delete the event. I then re-exported it again to have a good version of the calendar.

Now I deleted the calendar on icloud.com and waited until it was gone on all my devices (about 10 minutes).
As the last step I imported the cleaned ICS file into the MacOS calendar and let it sync with iCloud and all devices.

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I’m back home!

Posted on 19.05.2020 by domi

After three years, 45 countries and more than 125’000km on the motorcycle I am finally back home in Switzerland!
More numbers and statistics of my trip are on my ATW blog imoff.to

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Still on the road!

Posted on 22.04.2019 by domi

Yes, I’m still on the road after two years!

I made it on my motorcycle down to Australia! And then from Chile in South America up to Panama!

Follow my journey on imoff.to, Instagram or Youtube!

San Blas Islands, Panama
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivien
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