I just acquired an Apollo DN5500 (including keyboard and mouse) that has
been in storage for on the order of 25 years.

Is there anything I should do specifically as I start to refurbish it? (I don’t have the machine here at a moment, I need to clean it thoroughly
before it’s allowed in my home…)

1. I assume the hard disk is not SCSI, and will have a (very) limited life
if it starts up at all. Should I expect it to be MFM or ESDI? How should I
go about imaging it?

2. I assume Domain/OS 10.4 won’t run on it, which is the only OS that I
have handy since it was put on Bitsavers. (I might have a line on a source
for 10.3.5 though.) Any suggestions for how to find an OS for it? I assume
what I should do is get 10.4 running on my 425t or 433s, and then net-boot
an older OS on the DN5500. Is that something that should work?

3. I assume it doesn’t use standard 30-pin or 72-pin SIMMs. If the RAM in
the system does work, and is something like 8MB, should I even bother
trying to expand it?

Anything else I’m missing? Anyone have a line on a service manual or
anything like that? Or ATR cabling/routing/bridging?

— Chris

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The disk is either ESDI or SCSI. It will run sr10.4 just fine, in fact I think that's required for SCSI disk. It should boot diskless, you need sau14 installed on the server. It's not possible, or at least not easy, to boot one version of the OS from a
server that's running a different version.

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