bp on rom.by and something called awd32gb from rainbow but I don't know if it is for public use.

I am having a strange problem with this board...

I think I have properly configured jumpers and replaced its dead CMOS battery with a new one, but I noticed something strange: it looks like BIOS settings are preserved even *without the battery*, but the year is always reset to "2094" no matter what after next reboot, with or without the battery present. The day, month and time seem to be working fine, however.

I have measured voltages from the CMOS battery and they seem to be fine around the socket and in nearby traces. I am wondering if it could be an issue with BIOS, but so far I haven't found any updated (or outdated for that matter) BIOS for that board. If anyone happens to have a similar board, would you mind sharing its BIOS dump?

@ykot: somewhere in the thread there's already a bios backup dumped

evasive wrote on 2020-06-26, 19:44:

@ykot: somewhere in the thread there's already a bios backup dumped

Actually it is my own BIOS backup that I've provided, so it doesn't count. 😀

Further investigation led me to believe that it's a Y2K problem that is more severe in my BIOS version so it will not accept any year after 1999 (the worst-case Y2k bug in BIOS) and will always revert to wrong year at POST. There is a TSR utility called Y2Kure that may fix alleviate the problem. I will try that tool soon and will post an update here, but would definitely prefer an BIOS update.

I've read elsewhere that AWARD BIOS can be patched to fix Y2K problem, but haven't found yet ways to do it. This bug messes up what could be a very nice board...

There are some "Year 2000 RTC Bug Fix ISA Cards" up for sale at CPU-World forum, but I don't know if one of those would 100% fix your board.

Interesting tidbit of coding here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp. … ech/DdWF52yIpgc

I somehow have the feeling we have people in this forum that would be able to turn this into a patcher of some sort or at least could patch this particular bios. I'd be happy to try but my coding days are at least 25 years behind me...

EDIT: an article explaining what is going on:
https://books.google.nl/books?id=TodvBDXmM_oC … %20bios&f=false