VOGONS


First post, by brostenen

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Hi all.
I am currently in the process of restoring a Unisys 486 machine, and everything is working beautifully so far. Except for one tiny issue that I have with the floppy drive. In the BIOS it is set up as a 1.44mb floppy. And it will boot such disk's as if nothing is wrong.

Though if I try to format a floppy or read some floppy disks, the computer begins to think that this is a 360kb drive, and makes a media error, sector error and all sort of other failures.

I have tried two different floppy drives, and 4 different floppy cables. And I am beginning to think that the onboard floppy controller is defect. Do you gyus have any suggestions to what I can try and look for? My thoughts are that the controller is dead. And I am thinking about disabling the onboard IDE/Floppy controller and use a generic controller. There is no hurry here, as I have packed the machine away in the closet, in order to do another 486 project, that are well overdue. So yeah.... I might start looking at this within the next week and a half.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 2 of 4, by brostenen

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Yup.... The BIOS battery is dead. One of those Dallas RTM batteries 🙁
I will order a new one from eBay, and desolder the old one.

Anyone know what socket I can use, in order to be able to easily change the battery in the future?
The plan is to solder in a socket, mount the battery in the socket and secure it with a zip-tie.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 3 of 4, by elod

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It's a standard dip socket as far as I know, just match the spacing on farnell and you're good to go. You should be able to find it in a competent local electronics shop.

Reply 4 of 4, by lolo799

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I recognized the symptoms as my 486 has one of those Dallas RTC with a dead battery too, the drivparm command works around that particular issue, it should work for you.

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