First post, by Keatah
I've got a Micronics Gemini Baby AT. With a 486 DX2/50 factory installed. And I can't get into any sort of bios/cmos setup. The system also has a 1.2MB 5.25 drive, and a 1.44MB 3.5 drive.
It displays the Videocard BIOS and motherboard bios just fine.
It counts up to 16MB just fine.
Makes 2 beeps and displays:
Invalid Configuration Information - Please run setup program.
Strike F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility.
Ok.. So..
I try F1 and I get:
Diskette Read Failure
Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for Setup Utility.
I tried several 1.2 and 1.44 boot disks. No luck there.
if I try F2 I get:
Errors have been found during the Power On Self Test in your computer. The errors were:
Clock Chip lost power.
---
And that's it. No matter what I try I can't get into the standard Phoenix BIOS setup. I assume the drive errors are because the drives aren't configured properly. Catch-22 it seems.
While I have not replaced the battery, don't want to put another Varta on the mobo, I did patch in a 3.5 - 3.7 battery. No change. I also waited several hours to ensure the residual voltage dropped to zero. Hopefully that was sufficient to clear the memory.
Is there some sort of trick or am I missing something obvious? It's been ages since I tore into a 486 system with startup issues.. HELP!!