Hello there,
This a story of one of those computer you never though you will ever see for real. Then you got one.
I'd like to start with a warm thank you to @zefrenchtoon who put me in touch with the seller of that big lot of macs in France, and of course, many thanks to the seller who was absolutely nice. Big thanks to @jajan547, without his help to find an ANS ROM, this work wouldn't be possible!
So here we are I'm in my car with an ANS 500/132 travelling back to home, so much question in my head, how I gonna find an OS for this, this, how I'm going to find a ROM. And how I'm going to find proper memory? By the way... How I'm supposed to plug and hard drive in this thing... Will it ever work?
The ANS wasn't in a great condition, it was dirty, missing half of the disk carriers, had some corrosion, is missing all RAM, ROM and cache sticks. But I knew it was worth trying to get it back to life.
The ROM problem was quickly out of the equation thanks to @jajan547 and it allowed me to grab a backplate for a disk carrier in order to install a SCSI narrow drive.
But before thinking about powering up the ANS, some deep cleaning and inspection was mandatory.
Let's start shall we? I've already removed both fans and drive carriers, ready to disassemble the whole thing.
From the outside, it just look bad, the server is quite dirty and dusty, sometime rusty.
The inside is a bit better tho.
Hopefully the motherboard is perfectly fine despite a minor damage on the cache slot (broken anchor)
After a challenging battle I managed to remove the front panel, because I didn't have the key of the lock and the machine was not in service mode the whole assembly was locked. Fortunately there was a little gap that allowed me to unscrew the bottom support and loosen the front panel assembly.
After removing the plastic part I started removing the bottom by unplugging the power outlet and sliding out the power supply, last step was the separate the bottom from the metal cage.
Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!
This a story of one of those computer you never though you will ever see for real. Then you got one.
I'd like to start with a warm thank you to @zefrenchtoon who put me in touch with the seller of that big lot of macs in France, and of course, many thanks to the seller who was absolutely nice. Big thanks to @jajan547, without his help to find an ANS ROM, this work wouldn't be possible!
So here we are I'm in my car with an ANS 500/132 travelling back to home, so much question in my head, how I gonna find an OS for this, this, how I'm going to find a ROM. And how I'm going to find proper memory? By the way... How I'm supposed to plug and hard drive in this thing... Will it ever work?
The ANS wasn't in a great condition, it was dirty, missing half of the disk carriers, had some corrosion, is missing all RAM, ROM and cache sticks. But I knew it was worth trying to get it back to life.
The ROM problem was quickly out of the equation thanks to @jajan547 and it allowed me to grab a backplate for a disk carrier in order to install a SCSI narrow drive.
But before thinking about powering up the ANS, some deep cleaning and inspection was mandatory.
Let's start shall we? I've already removed both fans and drive carriers, ready to disassemble the whole thing.
From the outside, it just look bad, the server is quite dirty and dusty, sometime rusty.
The inside is a bit better tho.
Hopefully the motherboard is perfectly fine despite a minor damage on the cache slot (broken anchor)
After a challenging battle I managed to remove the front panel, because I didn't have the key of the lock and the machine was not in service mode the whole assembly was locked. Fortunately there was a little gap that allowed me to unscrew the bottom support and loosen the front panel assembly.
After removing the plastic part I started removing the bottom by unplugging the power outlet and sliding out the power supply, last step was the separate the bottom from the metal cage.
Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!
