VOGONS

Search

Common searches

286 PC with good battery won't keep CMOS settings

Topic actions

First post, by Jolaes76

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I have several 286 motherboards that act like this:

with a perfect Tadyran external battery attached, the CMOS settings can be saved and kept, including date and time. Well, as long as there is no HDD controller card or multi I/O card of any sort in the motherboard...

When Winbond, LG, Acer based IDE multi I/O controllers are present or I put in an AHA-1542 SCSI card, CMOS checksum errors come up at boot and settings are re-set to BIOS defaults.

The batteries I tried are surely healthy. What on earth is this then? Do my motherboards have some sort of power leak - ie, some ISA cards suck out all the juice at startup from the RTC... ?

286/XT gurus, please help!

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 1 of 2, by Markk

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

That sounds familiar with the symptoms I got on a 286 while I was trying to install some hardware that seemed either incompatible for some reason(a specific controller I think), or faulty(a hard disk with some serious issues that didn't work). I remember that when I removed that piece of hardware the system worked as it should.

Reply 2 of 2, by Jolaes76

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Thanks, this confirms my suspicion...
Yet, it is strange that these Headland based 286 motherboards are so allergic to many types of HDD controllers. I hope I will find one that do not reset the CMOS.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to General Old Hardware
Close window
Close window