Computer Refurbishing Procedures

The Tulsa Computer Society and Bethesda Boys Ranch jointly operate a Computer Refurbishing Project. We have developed some tools and procedures which we use ourselves, and which we have provided to some other Computer Refurbishing projects which we have helped start. The purpose of these pages are to document some of the tools and procedures we use in that effort.

When we receive a donated machine we:

Check it out to see if it works.
If it does not work, we try to see if we can get it to work, using parts which have been previously checked out and verified as operational.
If that fails, we take the monitors, keyboards, and all of the cables, cards, hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, motherboards, memory, power supplies, etc out of the machine, and put them with other parts, of unknown operational status, that are of the same type.
Whenever we have collected enough similar parts to justify the effort, we take them to a breadboard computer, which is operational, but all of the parts are spread on a breadboard, i.e. not bolted into a case. This makes it very easy to swap parts in and out, and, if we are checking out video cards, for example, we remove the video card from the operational breadboard system, insert one of the video cards of unknown operational status, and if the breadboard system still works, we assume that video card is good, and we mark it that way, and put it with other tested video cards for use in reparing other systems. We then test the next video card in the stack, repeating the effort until we have checked out all video cards of unknown operational status.
This procedure is not limited to video cards, of course. We use the same procedure to check out memory chips, hard disks, floppy disks, power supplies, even mother boards.

If the received system is operational, or if it can be repaired using checked out spare parts, we make a note of the operating system which it has on it, and we then proceed to completely erase the harddisk, thus removing any possible personal files the donor may have left on the machine, and we transfer over a fresh copy of the appropriate operating system image. If we cannot determine the current operating system, we go with the assumption that almost all computers are sold with the Microsoft Operating System that is current at the time the machine was made, thus we presume we are not violating any copyright laws to copy a Windows 3.1 image onto a 386 (or very slow 486) system which generally came with Windows 3.1, or to copy Windows 95A or Windows 95B onto a machine which is the level of machines that generally came with that operating system installed.

When we first started we manually used FDISK, Format, etc to set up the target machine for an image transfer, but now we use a special Drive Setup Disk (photo). There are a number of image transfer procedures (like Ghost) that work on the sector level, which make sense for OEMs that are making a lot of the same type of machine, but they have problems when the disk architecture of the source system is unlike the disk architecture of the target system. We therefore use image files compressed and then expanded by LHA (download) which operates at the file level. We transfer an operating system image in via several different possible procedures:

If the target machine does not have a CD, and if we don't want to go to the trouble of temporarilly installing a hard disk with the Master CD files, we use an Interlink Cable / Lap Link Cable (which can be ordered from ComputerGate) to connect the printer port (photo) of the target machine to a machine with the files from the Master CD installed on the hard disk, and use a Clone3 or Clone4 disk (depending on whether we want to install Win 3.1 / Win95a or if want to install Win95b) (photo) to setup the target machine as an Interlink Server, and transfer the files across the parallel cable. The target system is booted from the Clone3/Clone4 disk and "Server Interlink Connection, this computer is Server" is selected (photo), and once it is up and the screen shows this. Then the Master system is booted from the clone disk and "Client Interlink Connection, this computer is Client" is selected. The allocation of what Master Drive is assigned to what Target Drive scrolls by on the screen, but it goes so fast that it is best to look at the Target System. In this example it says Drive C on This (server) maps to Drive F on the Other (client) machines. Since we are typing on the Master (client) system, we tell it to transfer the files to drive F. While the transfer is running we see and "*" blink on and off in the Drive Mapping area, and on the bottom bar on the Target system we see "Transfer: Writing".
If the target machine has an operational CD Rom drive we use the Clone3/Clone4 disk to install temporary dos drivers, and use a Master CD to transfer the proper image file directly to the hard disk of the target machine.
If we want to do open the computer and temporarilly install a second hard disk with the image files from the Master CD on it, we can transfer the images from hard disk to hard disk.

Once we have transferred the image file we turn off the target system (to eliminate any viruses which might be in memory (photo)), remove any floppy from Drive A:, remove the master hard drive (if we used the third alternative described above) and set up the target hard drive as the primary master. We then turn the machine on, and let it boot up. If we have installed Win95a or Win95b, the first step is to authorize it to restore the 32 bit file names. Once that finishes the autoexec.bat file is automatically updated, so that the restore is only offerred the first time the system is booted.

The system automatically does an "Add New Hardware" and when it finishes we will see that it will remove some devices which were installed on the "image file" system, and which are found on the target system.

If the system is being installed on a Pentium system it will want to reboot before it finishes finding the second (PCI) bus. It is important to tell it not to reboot at that point, but rather to do another "Add New Hardware" to make sure it finds everything before allowing it to reboot.

Note you will probably see a "Your display driver does not support QuickRes. Don't worry about this. When you finish and reboot, and get the new display driver installed, you can right click on the desktop, select Settings, and select at least 256 colors and you will no longer see the QuickRes error.