Urgently need an old 486 PC

The_Librarian said:
The CMOS battery can be replaced - either by unsoldering it from the motherboard and replacing that with a new one - or by adding a battery pack.

But if it stops responding after 30 sec then the motherboard might be shot.

What I would do is I would swop the boards, get the unit up and running.

Then take a shufty at replacing the CMOS battery & testing the motherboard - and if working 100%, keep it as a spare.
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We replaced the cmos battery, but that didn't help.
 
did you have any windows installed on the machine at all? or was it purely dos 6.22? if it was just plain old dos then it wilol work else with windows might get BSOD
 
I have also seen that a slight difference in BIOS boot versions will mean that it will pick up the hard drive, but it won't pick up the correct boot sector.

Touch and go.

Try it, if it works, you're home free.

If not, try another HDD, get it to boot (install a bare DOS system) then do an xcopy *.* from the old (original HDD) to the new (fresh install of DOS).

And don't swap source/destination! :)


Ahhh... I miss the good old days of just xcopy the contents of your HDD over to a bigger HDD - no need to reinstall anything :D (just the bare OS though).
 
yeah those were the good old days hahaha when installing dos took like 5 min. but xcopy took forever tho remember upgrading from like a 100MB hdd to a 2GB hdd it took forever to copy over. I still have a Working XT at home
 
The_Librarian said:
Vintage! Love it! :D

Those motherboards are more durable than today's piffly motherboards... :D
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They certainly are! Had many a good DOS game played on it, including LSL1 :)

kayvee said:
Wot, no maths co-processor?? Gotta luv those huge RAM chips too.
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LOL. From what I remember those chips on the board were 256k modules, real high-end stuff back then, and I had all 8 slots filled - a whopping 2MB RAM!!!
 
Loved the old days was running scuzzy drives i got from some severs a whopping 200Mb
 
I have a pair of 486's laying around here somewhere ( might be 386's, or just one of each ), they should still work ( though I may have ninja'd some screws out of them over time )

PM me if you're interested.
 
Thanks Howard for the pc. We are still trying to get the machine going. Using the 486 I got from Howard, it starts up but cannot read the hard drive. The board doesna't have an onboard connector, the hard drive connects through an interface card. Also if we try a P2 machine, it boots up and the program starts, but there is no communication between the various ports and the machine. Any help or ideas will be appreciated. BTW, if anyone still has a 486, please let me know.
 
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