900MHz Trunked Maxtrac Woes

ayaresr · Post by **ayaresr** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:19 pm

Well, just when I thought I was getting somewhere...everything stops again. I have a 900 MHz Maxtrac here that I am attempting to program and get going with. It is a trunked version. When I try to read the radio right now I am coming up with Error 5 -Power Fail on Serial Port. This was in Windows XP. Yes I know...shame on me for trying. I attempted to load dos 6.22 on my IBM laptop, but the RSS is coming up with a com port error. I can't find anywhere in the bios for this laptop dealing with the serial port. I never liked the IBM bios to begin with. I'm not sure if its not releasing the com port to dos or what. Any suggestions? I have another computer here to try but need to do quite a bit of work to get to that point with it and would rather not if theres another fix. Thanks, Ryan

Max-trac · Post by **Max-trac** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 8:10 pm

Did you try switching com ports in the RSS setup screen?
What ver RSS are you running? The latest ver 7.02 is your best bet on a fast machine (faster than a 386).

ayaresr · Post by **ayaresr** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 8:35 pm

I am running 7.02. The laptop I tried it on was a 233MHz Pentium II. On the laptop I mentioned above, no matter which com port I select, I get an error (not sure exactly which one...will look in the morning) but I believe it is something along the lines of the selected port does not exist or could not be opened or something.

kcbooboo · Post by **kcbooboo** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 3:45 am

Some IBM laptop BIOSes have this nasty little configuration item that either shares port assignments with modems, or allows someone to disable them completely. So you should go through the BIOS and verify that COM1 is at the appropriate default address of 03F8.

If your laptop has a floppy drive and you're NOT using NTFS on the hard drive, make a boot floppy, configure the BIOS to boot from that device, and start pure DOS. Run the software on your hard drive and it should not have any port problems. If it does, toss that P.O.S. aside and get a "real" computer made from Taiwanese parts to be used solely for programming.

If you're machine is new enough to be running Win2K or WinXP and is using NTFS, then this procedure will unfortunately not work because I don't think there's any floppy-disk-bootable operating system that can read and write NTFS.

Bob M.

ayaresr · Post by **ayaresr** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 8:16 am

I did format the hard drive and installed pure dos (6.22). The bios on this laptop is a very cut down version, I have seen it on IBM's before. All they give you are board initialize (for after bios upgrade), boot order, system tests, and reboot. There is no where the change any other options. Looks like its time to revive on of the other computers. Wasn't looking forward to this but I'll give it a shot and see where that gets me.
-Ryan

kcbooboo · Post by **kcbooboo** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 9:24 am

A lot of Compaqs and some IBMs had special disks or CDs that were an extended BIOS Setup program. I actually have a Compaq server that has NO on-board setup program; they loaded that onto the hard drive as a hidden partition, so you'd lose it if you replaced the drive. Wonderful design.

Bob M.

ayaresr · Post by **ayaresr** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 11:12 am

Now that you say that I do remember a Compaq server I worked on that was setup that way. As you said...great idea by the design team.

ayaresr · Post by **ayaresr** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 2:56 pm

Well, a little crunch time on the dos command line and i got the IBM utility to disable the ir and enable the com port. I am now in business. Thanks for all the help as always everyone!

Post by **wavetar** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:13 pm

ayaresr wrote:Well, a little crunch time on the dos command line and i got the IBM utility to disable the ir and enable the com port. I am now in business. Thanks for all the help as always everyone!

Good work. I recall some other posts stating the IR messed up the COM ports. Glad you got it going.

Todd