NCR System3300

Class: 3350, Model 4600, Serial Number 15-29124575

The Motherboard is dated August 21, 1994, the CPU board is dated July 24, 1994.

NCR was one of a small group of companies that made IBM PC compatible systems that included a Microchannel I/O bus instead of the usual ISA bus. NCR licensed the Microchannel design from IBM.

This system was donated without the internal SCSI hard disk. We installed the correct drive, but we don't know the what is the SCSI ID setting should be.

It seems to need a password to get into the BIOS setup to configure the system. We don't have a setup diskette for this system. On most PCs there is a jumper to erase the BIOS settings or the battery can be removed. On this system the lithium battery that keeps the settings is inside of the clock chip. Without some documentation, or hints from someone knowledgeable about this system it is unlikely that we will be able to get it running.

The front of the NCR System3300.

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3/3/12

We found some of the support utilities for this system at: http://www.ibmmuseum.com/ohlandl/ncr/3350.html

We found motherboard information at: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/N/NCR-CORPORATION-486-MODEL-3350-WORKSTATION-SERVER.html

We cleared the CMOS settings. That let us boot the reference diskette and reconfigure the system. The configuration files for the Ethernet board were not on the diskette so it was not configured.

We updated the BIOS with the reference diskette. When we power cycled the system it complained about the switch settings on the CPU board. We set it to Pentium and it was happy.

With the SCSI ID on the disk set to 0 we can see the select light on the drive flicker when the system is restarted. FDISK does not find any drives, so we still have some work to do.

The data label on the bottom of the NCR System3300.

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3/10/12

I made a diagnostic diskette for the 3350 and found that the replacement SCSI disk drive was defective.

We installed a 2.12 GB SCSI drive, low level formatted, partitioned, DOS formatted, and installed DOS and a boot block.

The system will now boot to DOS.

We now need to decide what OS to install on the system.

It looks like DOS, OS/2, SCO Unix, and Unix System V Release 4.0. are possibilities.

This is the CPU board from the NCR System3300.

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This system has a Pentium Overdrive CPU chip.

Other CPU chips can be installed in the board if the switch settings are changed.

These are the Microchannel slots in the NCR System3300.

The board at the top is an IBM Token-Ring and the board at the bottom is an IBM Ethernet.

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