Definately shot PSU or a short in some component in which a power plug from the PSU in inserted to
Remove the battery ASAP and clean the area around it....
My soldering skills are nada too but I managed to replace some batteries during the years with a fine soldering iron..I just heat the soldering point so it becomes liquid and lift up one side of the battery at a time and liquidize the solder point again and mount the new battery 😀

If your mobo has a header for external batter you can you this http://cgi.ebay.com/Computer-Battery-cor-CMOS … 1QQcmdZViewItem
so you don't have to mess with soldering on a new battery

OK, I'm going to try and pick out a suitable AT PSU from ebay this weekend, and hopefully get it delivered for later on next week.

I tried a couple of times to simply pull off the battery, away from the mobo, but it seems stuck. I looked at the area to the side of the battery, right on the mobo itself, and there appears to be a "frozen" pool of white/grey goo, which looks a bit like glue, effectively gluing the battery to the mobo. I think if I tried to pull the battery away, it would take some of the mobo with it!

I looked at this on the net:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/M/MI … 4143-VER-1.html

It is for version 1.0 (I have version 1.2, and it's ALI2 chipset btw!) The manual above mentions:

Battery type select internal JB1 Pins 2 & 3 closed
Battery type select external JB1 Closed

I have located JB1 on my mobo, but I'm not sure what an external battery header looks like - looking at that ebay item listing for an external battery which you provided, I see its plug looks quite long and slim. There is a bank of 8 unused pins very close to the typical LED/speaker pins on my mobo. Perhaps that's where to plug in an external battery plug?

Thanks a lot for the info. 😀

The mystery deepens - I removed the PSU, and plugged it in to a different mobo, which I know works OK. And I now get power from this PSU. This could mean that there is something wrong with the mobo (the MS-4143). I wonder whether that "messy battery" is causing the PSU to not deliver any power to the mobo?

I'll keep messing about with it...

SOLVED! 😳

The person who sold me this machine must have taken the CPU out of it's "grid array thing" on the mobo to see what CPU was installed (because I remember asking him), and then put the CPU back in to the "grid array thing" the wrong way around! Now I've put the CPU back in the right way - with the tiny pointer mark pointing towards the isolated pin hole on the grid array, I get power from the PSU!

Perhaps, now I've solved this puzzle, I've graduated from idiot to intermediate? 😉

I can get this thing to boot up now. But I get the fairly typical "CMOS checksum failure" message on screen, and then I am prompted to enter the setup utility section (BIOS). The problem is that it asks me to -

Enter ROM password

I haven't got a clue what it is. I managed to track down a manual of sorts, which is -

e4143v14.exe (google for it, and it's on a Russian website)

Unfortunately, this small manual has no information (which I could see anyway) regarding clearing of the CMOS.

I checked -

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboard...VER-1.html

But there's no mention of a "CMOS CLEAR" jumper.

Can I run a utility from a floppy disc, to clear/wipe the CMOS from the BIOS? It's an AMIBIOS (c) 1994 American Megatrends.

Thanks a lot for any help - I feel as if I'm nearly there with this beast. I'd love to see it working properly, so I can do some benchmarking speed tests, which incidentally I've never done before on any machine, let alone an ancient monster such as this 486.

Edit: I tried running a program called amipswd.com (ami password), but it displays the error message:

Fatal error: Unknown BIOS type

see here if something works for you:

http://www.elfqrin.com/docs/biospw.html
http://motherboards.mbarron.net/bios.html#setup

By any chance have you just tried to hit enter... maybe the default password is blank.

I have tried a few techniques to access the BIOS, but so far I haven't succeeded. I've tried some typical AMI BIOS default passwords, including just pressing the Return key. I've also tried the 'DEBUG' technique at the A:\ dos prompt.

I'm wondering whether the CPU may be damaged. Please see photo. It doesn't specify what it is. Also, it doesn't recognise the A: drive, but incorrectly states there is a B: drive present, which there isn't.

Before I try some more techniques to access the BIOS, do you think I should try chaning the CPU? The reason I ask, rather than simply doing this right away, is because it'll probably take me half an hour of ferretting about in the attic to go find one.

Thanks a lot for any help. 😀

Edit: I tried another dx2-66 chip. It wouldn't go in at first, pins were bent, but I straightened them out and it went in - just about! Well, that didn't help either. Maybe that leaky battery has messed about with the BIOS chip? It's quite close to it. Do you think my next best move is to try and flash the BIOS at the A: prompt with a flash utility on floppy disc?

Edit 2: Perhaps I can't flash the BIOS myself, due to the age of the hardware? The AMIBIOS chip has this information on it:

486DX ISA BIOS
AC1131103

I don't think it looks soldered on to the mobo. Maybe I could remove it, and replace it with a "new" one? Or perhaps find someone who could flash it using a special BIOS flash machine?

Agh! Damn bios passwords! 😠

It would do about nothing if the BIOS software was damaged.
As it said 'CMOS checksum error' it can't have a valid password. Maybe it has to do with the 'furred' jumpers...

Are you some sort of energy being, RG100? Check out that self portrait there. I always imagined that aliens would be curious about retro gaming...

My MS4144 will give that error message when the HDD isn't there or its partitions are messed up. Try your Promise PCI IDE card in there and see if you can get to fdisk with a boot floppy.

swaaye wrote:

Are you some sort of energy being, RG100? Check out that self portrait there. I always imagined that aliens would be curious about retro gaming...

My MS4144 will give that error message when the HDD isn't there or its partitions are messed up. Try your Promise PCI IDE card in there and see if you can get to fdisk with a boot floppy.

Hehe, I had to put my thumb over the camera's flash bulb when I pointed it at the screen, to take that pic. I managed to get most of the bright flash to not spoil the picture, but that red energy ball remained. 😀

I'm definitely going to try out your advice first thing tomorrow morning!! 😀 Tonight however, my battery levels are low, and I need to put my brain back on its recharger...

swaaye wrote:

Are you some sort of energy being, RG100? Check out that self portrait there. I always imagined that aliens would be curious about retro gaming...

My MS4144 will give that error message when the HDD isn't there or its partitions are messed up. Try your Promise PCI IDE card in there and see if you can get to fdisk with a boot floppy.

Agh! Damn this machine! 😠 I tried the Promise PCI IDE card, with 3 different cables and with 3 different HDDs. I didn't try out this permutation exhaustively, just swapped about with the cables and HDDs 'ad hoc' style, but in all cases that I did try, I get exactly the same message:

(words to the effect of) " Promise BIOS not installed because no drives attached. "

I can boot up using a floppy disc in the 3.5" drive OK. But fdisk says there are no fixed disks present.

The PC's BIOS seems to assign IRQ #5 to the Promise card in PCI slot 1, and IRQ #15 to the Trident graphics card in PCI slot 2. I haven't tried moving the cards about, or even replacing the Trident card - it came with the machine, so I just left it in for the time being.

Sigh. It's times like this that makes me wonder why on earth I'm doing all of this. Maybe I should get a console or something. No, forget I just said that.

Any ideas please people? 😕 😢

IRQ15 is traditionally assigned to the secondary IDE controller. Could be a resource conflict beween the video card and the controller.
You could try swapping the video card into a different PCI slot. maybe it gets a different IRQ then.
Frankly, you won't have much fun with this board unless you're able to get rid of the leaky battery and stop the acid from spreading. From the pictures you posted in the other thread, it looks pretty nasty. 🙁
I hate to say this, but it seems this board isn't worth repairing.

5u3 wrote:

IRQ15 is traditionally assigned to the secondary IDE controller. Could be a resource conflict beween the video card and the cont […]
Show full quote

IRQ15 is traditionally assigned to the secondary IDE controller. Could be a resource conflict beween the video card and the controller.
You could try swapping the video card into a different PCI slot. maybe it gets a different IRQ then.
Frankly, you won't have much fun with this board unless you're able to get rid of the leaky battery and stop the acid from spreading. From the pictures you posted in the other thread, it looks pretty nasty. 🙁
I hate to say this, but it seems this board isn't worth repairing.

I've just done lots of "slot swapping". No joy.

You're right, I don't think this board will work - not in it's current state anyway. I think the board's BIOS been damaged by the acid. If I can find a replacement chip, I'd be happy to persevere with it.

I've been given a couple of BIOS files, which might work with this board. Using one of those files, I could get a replacement BIOS chip. It's something I'll think about doing...

Right now, I guess it's time to move on, and test some other retro nik-naks. Let's hope something I pick out to test today WORKS!!! 🤣

Very strange that the Promise card's detection routine came up but failed to see the drive. Usually if there's some sort of PCI issue, the card's BIOS won't do anything at all and the system just boots right past it.

Here's a Q: do you have the most recent BIOS for the Promise card? Those cards were a nightmare when they were new. BIOS releases for them fixed them up dramatically. Ultra 66 was really bad.

swaaye wrote:

Very strange that the Promise card's detection routine came up but failed to see the drive. Usually if there's some sort of PCI issue, the card's BIOS won't do anything at all and the system just boots right past it.

Here's a Q: do you have the most recent BIOS for the Promise card? Those cards were a nightmare when they were new. BIOS releases for them fixed them up dramatically. Ultra 66 was really bad.

Yes! I definitely have the most recent BIOS for that Promise card. I remember the seller told me he had flashed it with the latest BIOS, and I even double-checked it for myself.

This battery acid - is it like that sci-fi movie called Alien, where it eats through the layers in PCB like it ate thru the deck layers of that space ship? The BIOS chip is maybe 1.2cm away from that evil leaking battery. Perhaps it's made the chip go kind of "mad"?

It spreads as a thin film across the board and eats the copper traces and other metal parts. The software in the BIOS is either intact or not. If the latter it will either just crash or fail it's checksum check which would result in beeps.
http://www.bioscentral.com/beepcodes/amibeep.htm

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

It spreads as a thin film across the board and eats the copper traces and other metal parts. The software in the BIOS is either intact or not. If the latter it will either just crash or fail it's checksum check which would result in beeps.
http://www.bioscentral.com/beepcodes/amibeep.htm

You've just given me an idea! 😀 How about I get myself a motherboard diagnostic card? Do you know if they are any good or not? I've never used one before, but I saw some the other day on ebay as I was just browsing about for nothing in particular.

retro games 100 wrote:

This battery acid - is it like that sci-fi movie called Alien, where it eats through the layers in PCB like it ate thru the deck layers of that space ship?

🤣 Nice analogy, but it doesn't happen exactly like that.

Repairing a board damaged by battery acid is quite a bit of work. First you'll have to get the acid off without damaging the rotten copper traces or other components. Then the traces have to be repaired with conductive paint, or replaced with wires. Affected solder joints may have to be renewed. And even if that goes well, there is still a big chance the board will break again.
All this work is only worthwhile when the damage is minimal.