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First post, by Xs1nX

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Hi all

I have a Hard Drive with Ontrack installed successfully, but with no floppy disk in the drive the system is not even attempting to boot from the hard disk at all it would seem ? So, am i missing something here ?

This may be related to the motherboard having a dead CMOS ?

Reply 1 of 9, by Xs1nX

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Changed to a old 125MB Drive and have the same problem.

Booting the DR DOS installer goes fine, formatting/partitioning and installing goes fine. But the system just will not boot from the hard drive at all.

Reply 2 of 9, by derSammler

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First, yes, if the CMOS battery is dead, this won't ever work.

Second, when you install Ontrack, it normally tells you which settings you have to make in the BIOS for the hard disk. Failing to do so will give you a non-booting system, too.

Reply 3 of 9, by Deksor

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You might need a bios setup floppy disk to configure the bios of your 286. Did you configure your bios properly ?

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 4 of 9, by Xs1nX

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Deksor wrote:

You might need a bios setup floppy disk to configure the bios of your 286. Did you configure your bios properly ?

I've been trying a program called GSETUP, and a program called ATSETUP.

Anyone have a link to a known good setup program for Phoenix bios version 3.07 ?

Reply 5 of 9, by Deksor

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Normally GSetup is good enough, iirc my 286 has the same bios version. However if your CMOS battery is dead, that's pointless to set it up because it can't save anything

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 6 of 9, by Xs1nX

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I thought maybe I could get away with the CMOS battery being dead for a while. Seems that is not the case.

Trying to find a replacement is proving difficult though as its a Varta 3/60DK, but the only battery's with that model number are 3 pin but mine is a 2 pin ?

Reply 7 of 9, by derSammler

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You can use any 3.6V NiCd battery, or even any sort of alkaline battery from 1V to 6V, which is the range almost all RTC/CMOS chips can work with. When not using a rechargeable battery, you need to add a diode, however (unless there's an ext. battery connector - then just use that).

Reply 8 of 9, by Xs1nX

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I have been told that the issues im having may also be to do with using the wrong bios setup utility, namely the Configuration error I get on boot up even though I have used GSETUP to set the right values.

So I am a bit confused as to what to do, if i got a replacement battery and the above is correct i am right back to square one.

Reply 9 of 9, by Koltoroc

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with a dead battery you will always get a "configuration Error" since you can't save anything.

If you replace the battery and the error persists, then you can start scrutinizing the setup software, because right now the software doesn't matter as none of them can save the settings.