It seems that spot on the PCB is empty by design, I found a video of this exact same laptop and at this time stamp (7:32) you can see that there's nothing on the PCB in that spot unfortunately. And his laptop works. https://youtu.be/vh82eCbVBaU?t=452 Good spot. No, I'm still pretty sure it's there, …

Well, I can't be sure since it's not a board I'm familiar with, but there is a footprint on the PCB right below the red wire that looks like it had one of those small barrel 32768Hz crystals, and a wire securing it going over from side to side. On the photo it looks like the wire has been cut and …

"CMOS inoperational" is not a battery issue, it's a BIOS POST error when a value written to NVRAM cannot be read back. So the first question to answer is why was that trace damaged? Corrosion? Short-circuit? Screwdriver jab? If one trace is damaged, there might be more. Shorted chips can easily get …

I didn't check the underside of the motherboard, maybe I can look for cold solder joints. Anything else which can be checked? First I would carefully and discreetly check pins of the chips with a toothpick or a needle. Maybe one or more pins are not soldered properly. VL82C331 is on the top side. …

Hi all ! I received an old Halikan 386sx laptop from a friend (it as a thrift shop find) and for some reason it won’t boot. All that it displays is CMOS inoperational System halted. I found a broken trace and used a jumper wire but that didn’t change anything. I removed the old cmos battery and …

The bios chips are the square-ish socketed ones. there's two, one for the high byte and one for the low byte. thanks, so maybe it's just a matter of cleaning the contacts? what else could it be? I am also slightly worried about the round gunk/dirt traces next to my jumper wire. Could those be signs …

Hi all ! I received an old Halikan 386sx laptop from a friend (it as a thrift shop find) and for some reason it won’t boot. All that it displays is CMOS inoperational System halted. I found a broken trace and used a jumper wire but that didn’t change anything. I removed the old cmos battery and …