Need help w/a 486SX!!!

[MichaelD]

Hi all,

A coworker gave me a complete Packard Bell 486SX system from 1992! Even gave me a 13" color monitor that works fine..got the manuals and everything....

Here's the problem. When you boot it:

1. You get the BIOS beep and it displays the bios startup stuff (Phoenix BIOS VERSION 1.0<----
2. It runs the memory tests
3. You get "INVALID CONFIGURATION INFORMATION, PRESS F2 TO CONFIGURE SYSTEM
4. Go into BIOS, it's like the battery was yanked....clock reset to 1 Jan 1990. Go ahead and configure everything and reboot
5. SAME message as #3! Repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
6. On repeat entries into the bios, sometimes the HD is autodetected and sometimes not, but no matter what you do, you get #3

The HD is spinning (it's a Conner 173MB drive) I even unplugged it while running (I know, I know) to verify that it started back up and it did.

I thought "maybe the BIOS battery is toast". So I found it. It's three disc batteries wrapped-up in a plastic sheath (like in a cordless phone) and it's SOLDERED to the mobo. <--WTF is up w/that?

What can I do here? At best, I've got a LINUX box to play with or a file server. At worst, I've got a 13" color monitor, a 3.5" floppy and a 52X CD-Rom, a newer ergo keyboard to keep. I'd like to get it up and running. Help, please.

 

[CTho9305]

I assume you used the BIOS "load defaults" option. You'll almost definitely need to specify the hard drive info. You may also have to go into the CMOS once, save, and quit for it to figure out how much ram it has (My 486 says "CMOS Memory Size Mismatch" and halts if I change ram without doing this the next boot). Do you have a voltmeter? Check the battery mess . If you can figureout the voltage, there is no reason you can't desolder it and replace it with something similar...
edit: My 486. DX33, 20mb ram, 400mb hard drive. If the html pages and c-compiled pages are slow, it is because of the stupid upstream cap for the dorms here. Check out the cpuinfo and uptime . Note how insanely slow perl scripts are.

 

[RossGr]

Sounds to me like the battery is dead, there exists a chance that if you leave it powered up for a few hours the battery will charge, there is an even greater chance that it will no longer hold a charge. If that is the case you may be SOL, perhaps you can find a replacement battery???.

I owned a coulble of Mobos with that type of battery, gotta remember that boards not much older thing yours did not even have a real time clock, the onboard clock was simply a counter, if you wanted the correct time and date you had to set it at boot up. You could buy ISA card real time clocks and automate the the process in your autoexec.bat file. ( My first IBM clone was a 8086 with dual 5 1/4" floppies, No hard drive.)

 

[CTho9305]

my 486. it sits under my roommates bed. it was there a month before he noticed

 

[vailr]

Try booting from the floppy drive (may require disconnecting the HD), to an "A:>" prompt. If that works, then it's only a matter of entering, in the bios, the correct HD head/cylinders/etc info. This info should be found printed on the HD label. But the first step would be to install a replacement battery. And a can of compressed air to clean out the dust.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks for all the info guys. I didn't realize how out of touch w/the older stuff I am. I don't know squat, honestly.

I haven't checked out the battery w/a voltmeter yet, nor have I tried to boot from a floppy. Ironicly, the woman who gave me this mess also gave me the ORIGINAL rescue disk. dated 1991 :Q I was a different person in 1991. Anyway.

CTho9305, that is SO Ghetto...I love the masking tape!!! Too kewl! Whatever's Clever, right? If it works, it works!

I guess I have a lot to check out before declaring it dead. Thanks again very much.

 

[CTho9305]

YGM. That has 8 meg ram... Debian (Slink) will fit in there . I think you could also get win95 on it and run apache under win95.

 

[tsnyder]

I bought my first pc (not including commodore 128) back in '93. Packard Bell 486DX 66mhz 4mb RAM and 400mb hard drive... oh and I bought a Sound Blaster 16bit for it...cuz back then pc's didn't come with sound cards, unless of course they were high end.

I was laughing at the fact the new Toshiba Pocket PC (e740) I just bought is faster and a little bit smaller than the packard bell... oh and I paid about $1500 for the packard bell and only $380 for the pocket pc, granted we are talking almost 10 years here.

 

[Buk]

I worked on one recently and, unless the battery pack is leaking and has crystal-like stuff on the ends of it, it will recharge. If it doesn't work out, pm/email me as I have half a dozen of the mobos. I'm sure we can find one that works for you. BTW, there may be a slot on the mobo for you to add an additional strip of ram. For support documents, you'll have to go to Packard-Bell's site in the UK Link .

Good luck....................

 

[RSMemphis]

Originally posted by: Buk
I worked on one recently and, unless the battery pack is leaking and has crystal-like stuff on the ends of it, it will recharge.

Not necessarily true, old batteries often act more as capacitors than still charge, which is a huge problem and sometimes can prevent the whole computer from even turning on.
(e.g. a Toshiba Satellite notebook my gf had. It turned on only after the internal battery was removed. A BIOS battery is less likely to do that, but I have seen an old 386 having problems because of it).

 

[MichaelD]

Good morning Gents,

Thanks very much for all the assistance; it's greatly appreciated. It's a trip popping open one of these dinosaurs and seeing 45 different jumpers/pin sets on the motherboard and everything all spastically laid-out. A far cry from ATX-heaven we are in these days.

I left it powered up (hung at the BIOS error screen, fans spinning, etc) overnight...about 5 hours or so, as to attempt to recharge the battery. No dice. Tried reconfiguring everything and hitting F4 to save settings and restart and I get the same error.

I will try what valir suggested and boot from the rescue floppy and see what happens. *shrug* I don't think I'll try to get it running (but thanks Buk for the mobo offer. ) I have too many PCs in my one-bedroom apartment already...I'm out of room, unfortunately.

But, the 13-inch color monitor stays. I'll just leave it hooked up to my server...finally, a dedicated "monitoring" monitor. The floppy is salvageable..the CDRom looks OK...it's old, but still appears to be working.

I'll try the boot from floppy thing later and report back. Thanks again and have a great day.

 

[Smilin]

Solder a good battery in parallel to the old. Couple inches of wire and some solder and you're good to go.

 

[Narse]

I can remember the older PB and other 486 systems having a set of three jumper type pins next to the battery on the MOBO, this was used to connect a new battery to the motherboard. I installed many of these back in the day when I worked as a tech in a mom and pop store


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