Everything beyond the basic turn it off and on again was done with the understanding that I could continue to use the machine with the single serial port, it would be irritating and slow but it wouldn't be a paperweight to me. After talking to Electronics Northwest (who was very helpful) I understood that these cards are a shit ass way to solve the communications problem and they will all eventually fail.
1. Check for 5v and 12v on the pc104 board, a quick search of pc104 pinout can show you which pins to test. Reseat all connectors multiple times. This is intended to break up and wear off any corrosion that may have built up on the pins/sockets. Remove etherenet, usb, floppy and second serial connector, if the error goes away boot the machine up with one more thing plugged in each time until it comes back. If it is that then you can either not use the offending device or try and toubleshoot that.
The default network settings can be restored if needed. Press Prgrm Convers during power up. Wait about 3 minutes then Press P Enter, then P5 Enter.
The tech at haas advised to try that with caution, he said he'd seen machines completely die after doing that. When he told me that I had already tried it twice and I am damn thankful nothing bad happened.
2. I used a sabrent usb to ide hdd adapter. The first time I powered it up it sounded like a terrible rod knock and kept vibrating and making that noise the entire time it was running. I quickly shut it off. I then ordered 2 drives of the exact model number off ebay made a quick little clean box out of a plastic container, saran wrap and rubber gloves. Removed the platters from the original drive and put them in one of the new drives. I fired that up and then quickly cloned the drive using Macrium Reflect (there is a ton of software that can do this, just happens to be what I used). This is a last ditch effort. I am incredibly surprised it worked, I have tried this a few times and it's never actually worked but at this point it's always been a matter of "can't fuck it up any worse than it is". If you have critical data on the drive and are inclined to spend the money send it to a data recovery service. Your windows machine will work to clone the drive but you may need some extra software if you're interested in removing specific data from the drive.
3. I'm sure there are but I don't know of any.
4. Yes, after doing a quick poke around the EXT3 partition that was on the drive it looks like if the drive isn't properly imaged nothing else on the pc104 will work correctly. There are scripts for mounting the usb, ethernet, hdd storage partition etc. The serial number is also referenced many times through that code so if you get an image from another drive there may still be a decent amount of work to get that to work for your machine.
5. Yeah, I hope I can find a way to fix what seems to be the inevitable failure of these boards. I'd love to be able to say I'll just get a vf2 or something when this thing dies but realistically that isn't in the cards, This machine is in my garage and the logistics of fitting and powering anything bigger would be too much of a pain in the ass, especially when I could just use a machine at work.
