About 15 years ago I found a Headland Technology 286 system on the street, which I had stored in my parents garage. The machine has 4M of RAM, a 1.2M drive and a 43M hard drive and VGA graphics card. Recently, I took it home to get it working, and have had little luck with the mainboard.

Attached is a photo of the mainboard. I have tested independently the hard drive and graphics card, and they do work. When I first started, it went through the memory check, but oddly it would either get stuck part way through, or pause, then continue. After getting into the CMOS setup, I noted that the time displayed in the setup would move forward a few seconds, then reset to midnight. After a reboot or two, the machine would then report "CMOS INOPERATIONAL. SYSTEM HALTED" almost immediately on power up. After that, every time I started it up, I would get that message almost immediately. I removed the barrel battery, as it had started leaking, but it made no difference. There is a small amount of corrosion near where the battery sat, which may or may not account for the problem.

I have also removed and reseated the two BIOS chips, as well as the RAM. I don't believe the absence of the battery should result in the machine not starting, just not retaining CMOS settings.

If I left it off and disconnected from power for at least a few days, I could get it working, albeit briefly. Recently, I had it unplugged for about a month, and it was able to run long enough for me to configure the floppy disk drive and boot DOS from it. It ran for about 30 minutes or so, while I tried to get the hard drive set up working, then back to "CMOS INOPERATIONAL. SYSTEM HALTED". It seems the longer it is left off and disconnected, the longer it will run?

A photo of the board is attached. I suspect the problem may be the real time clock, wihch may be the object labelled YCL 9024 between two ISA slots?

I've reached the limit of my troubleshooting abilities here, and looking for some help as to where to go from there.

Thank you,