Booting my 2005 IBM ThinkCenter S50

If you’ll remember from last time, after unpacking my new 2005 IBM ThinkCenter S50, I was without a keyboard or a way to connect a monitor. So the only things that I knew worked, were opening the DVD-ROM tray, the power and hard disk LEDs and the CPU fans.

But there was another problem. While having, until now, focused my retro computing activities to the eighties and very early nineties, with PCs, I’ve always just kept with the time. Never did I have to bridge the decades by trying to make old PC things work with new PC things. The commercial market for Sinclair, Atari and MSX computers never lived long enough for these problems to arise. I suppose finding cheap dongles online didn’t trigger me into thinking those were never going to work.

When the package deliverer rang in the afternoon, I opened the door to see his van with its back doors opened, but I didn’t see him. When, after several minutes, he emerged from his van, he reluctantly explained he had two packages for me, but could only find one. It was the one with the VGA cable and the VGA to USB-C dongle that I had ordered to connect the ThinkCenter to my monitor’s last free port. Annoyed, I accepted his promise to deliver it, at the latest, next Monday (it was a Saturday). I went back to my study and connected the VGA output to my monitor, turned on the ThinkCenter and saw nothing.

The ThinkCenter, open on my desk

Then the bell rang again. The package deliverer had found the other package, the one with the keyboard PS/2 dongle, so now at last I could connect my keyboard to the ThinkCenter (or so I thought).

Still, no signal on the monitor. I got an older monitor from the attic, an AOC monitor with a VGA input, hoping it was the VGA to USB-C dongle that was the issue.

It was, of course, but things were more elusive than that. The AOC monitor’s screen remained black too. What was going on? I disconnected the power cable again, opened the machine again and disconnected the hard drive, the disk drive and DVD-ROM. I took the SIMM from its slot, inspected its connectors and, incidentally, saw that it was 256 MB, the recommended amount for SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional. I pressed the power button down for 15 seconds to empty the capacitors. Still no signal.

I replaced the CMOS battery, which coincidentally was of a very generic type that we use for more devices here, so we had one left and available. Still no signal. By now I began to wonder if this machine was a lost cause. I hadn’t paid a lot for it in money, but spending an afternoon with it had apparently made me emotionally invested enough to wonder if I had, for the first time in my life, feel enthousiastic about a PC. There was one thing that I hadn’t tried yet, though: booting without RAM. I hadn’t heard the speaker yet, but I could see it and it appeared connected. I hoped the machine to at least start beeping when it wouldn’t be able to find any RAM.

At last!

It happily and cheerfully did. I turned off the machine again, unplugged the power yet again, reseated the tiny SIMM into the first RAM slot and turned the machine on again. And then, at last, undoubtely shaken from the RAM-less experience, the monitor came to life, showing an IBM logo for a few seconds. The logo was replaced with a screenful of errors demanding I press F1 immediately or else.

• 0162: System boards
• 0211: Memory
• 0662: Floppy drive or adaptor

Sadly, The F1 key press on my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard via its USB-C to USB-A dongle and USB-A to PS/2 dongle never reached the ThinkCenter. Keyboardwise, it seems, I’ll need a different solution. The ThinkCenters originally came with style-correct keyboards but they got less than enthousiastic reviews, and they are difficult to find.

Dongles with an unrelated but working example

This was not a well-researched project. As I leared during the attempts to get my machine to run described above, both VGA and PS/2 are analogue signals and to transform them to modern digital signals, a powered chip is needed to measure the incoming signal and create a digital conversion based on that. Simple dongles will do nothing but replace connectors. In retrospect, this seems very obvious. It was a learning experience though, and if it wasn’t obvious to me, perhaps there are others.

Lets hope the return to default settings has also cleared any and all BIOS passwords.