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Aww crap.

Demon-Xanth

Demon-Xanth

Lifer
There's a system in our cleanroom used for running a test. This system runs DOS 3.3 because the GPIB drivers don't work on anything newer. The software was written in QBASIC. Because manufacturing has an "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" type of mentality, and never has hired anyone to "fix it". Looking into updating it has never even been considered.

Here's what's happening:
It sees 640kB of RAM and says it's a memory size error, BIOS setup says 4620kB or something like that.
That may seem bad, but it's a 286. 640kB is probably right.
It forgot which diskette drives it had.
Given that, it may have forgotten which HD it has, and honestly, I can't tell.
"Missing Operating System" error on continuing boot.
The date: 15/15/15
The time occasionally includes characters like ":", "?", and "^".

I think some of the people working on this system are younger than the computer.

Edit:
And as far as I know, there's only one of them.
 
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
 
Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
Click to expand...
I've seen that before long, long ago. We had to order a new battery.
 
Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
Click to expand...

a bad CMOS does cause some goofy crap.
 
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
Click to expand...
I've seen that before long, long ago. We had to order a new battery.
Click to expand...


As much as it pains me to say this, I believe Conjur may be right. 😉
 
Originally posted by: Corn
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
Click to expand...
I've seen that before long, long ago. We had to order a new battery.
Click to expand...


As much as it pains me to say this, I believe Conjur may be right. 😉
Click to expand...

Unfortunalty most CMOS batterys on machines of this age will be soldered onto the board
 
Originally posted by: Corn
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Well, I think we found more of the computers. I'm hoping they work.

As far as the battery is concerned, I don't think that would explain the time having non-numbers.
Click to expand...
I've seen that before long, long ago. We had to order a new battery.
Click to expand...


As much as it pains me to say this, I believe Conjur may be right. 😉
Click to expand...
Agreed, I have seen the exact same thing before (with funky chars for the time) and it was a dead battery.
 
Yep, I'd definitely say the battery ist kaput. Might want to keep a few spares on hand, but lithiums in 286s seem to be good for 7-10 years.
All those errors are resulting from the lost settings. It's got 640k of basic RAM, and then about 4MB of either EMS or XMS (man, wasn't it fun configuring all that crap back in the day?)
 
Wait....WTF are you using this old pile. Do what notfred said. Sh|t, if you just ghosted the whole damn drive over it'd probably boot up and work fine.

Although...286 era...were IDE commonplace then? Or were they still using one of those old standards for hard disks?
 
Originally posted by: PingSpike
Wait....WTF are you using this old pile. Do what notfred said. Sh|t, if you just ghosted the whole damn drive over it'd probably boot up and work fine.

Although...286 era...were IDE commonplace then? Or were they still using one of those old standards for hard disks?
Click to expand...

286s saw (at a minimum) IDE, RLL, ARLL (I had one of these 🙂 ), and MFM HDDs. IDE was not very popular at the time, so it's VERY mixed as to what you see.

I wouldn't expect ghost to work with RLL/ARLL/MFM drives, but who knows...

edit: You don't really need to ghost this kind of setup though. You can format /sys (same version of DOS) a drive and xcopy the contents and that'll do just fine. Remember, DOS isn't as tricky as NT based kernels for booting.
 
1. Replace machine if possible
2. Replace CMOS battery.

It may be soldered/welded on if it's a lithium type, so you may have to do some in-depth work. Some batteries on older machines are velcroed onto the case somewhere and have wires going to the mobo. If that's the case, order a new battery. Good luck finding one. Any battery with the same voltage should be fine. In fact, you *might* be able to get away with a pack of AAs if the voltage is a multiple of 1.5.
 
another vote for replacing the battery

It would not suprise me to see funky characters in the time/date

edit: you've got a 80% chance that RadioShack has a replacement. Probably $4
 
I found a replacement in a catalog for $9 (Digikey). It's not soldered onto the board, just velcro'ed onto the case. And although the battery in it is 4.5, standard is 3.6. It'll probably work.

The HD was a Miniscribe 8051A that was 51 unformatted MB. Apparantly the memory error's been there for a while, and will continue to be there for a while longer. I got it to work, they just can't turn it off for a while. All the other bad CMOS batteries have only erased info to default, not made the clock and date insane.

The system is 15 years old.
 
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