On Malik's board it looks like pin 1 is the one by itself, while pin 4 is the one with an unused pin next to it. Does this match your board's orientation, h-a-l-9000? If so, then it's likely that they're standardized and that the unused pin 3 is a key pin that keeps you from connecting the battery cable backwards.

Yes, 1 is the one by itself "single" pin.

Yes, that seems to be the standardization. My board is the same. At any rate, I've hooked it all up and it works! I can now boot my 486 and the CMOS settings are memorized! Success! Thanks for all your help, everybody.

Except now for some reason my second hard drive isn't working properly. It's detected but it says Sector not found. Hopefully it's not toast. Tried in Windows, it seems Windows detects it but in DOS it has problems. I'll run Scandisk.

One of the secondary drives in my PIII-550 was working fine until I accidentally put it first in the boot order. It loaded OnTrack (one of those horrible boot sector loaders that is supposed to help make new disks work on old systems) and started booting some old Win98 install, so I did a hard reset. Now the BIOS only recognizes the drive 50% of the time, and my OSes recognize it 0% of the time. I had already backed up everything, though, so it's no big deal.

It seems I forgot to re-enable LBA mode for my HDDs in the CMOS. It worked in Windows because Windows does it itself, I guess. Works fine now. Back up and running!

Malik wrote:

http://www.vogons.org/files/soldered.jpg […]
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Awesome!!!

Could you please tell me how you fixed the wires to the black battery holder thingy?
Luckily I haven't thrown out my pile of scrap mobo's yet, I should have plenty of those black battery holder thingies available and plenty of motherboards to put them in.

Just one question: The mobo's whith the awful RTC dallas things don't have provision for an external battery, right? Would be a LOT easier then to try hacking into the Dallas chip with a drill

You just take the pins out of the wire connector and they plug right onto the pins of the battery holder. I realized this too late on my first attempt and snipped the ends right off the wires. I thought I had to wrap the copper around the pin. Then I tried the connector and it fit perfectly. Luckily I have extra cables lying around...

That reminds me that I recently desoldered one of those battery clips from an old mobo (probably my other i440BX one) to hold a replacement battery in a NES cartridge.

Tetrium wrote:

Malik wrote:

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Awesome!!!

I agree. 😀

Re: awful RTC dallas things - I have had good luck in buying these Dallas RTCs on ebay. All the cheap ones I bought worked. They were all in used condition, but their internal batteries seemed OK. Not a long term solution I know, but nevertheless better than nothing. However, I have a few mobos with the ODIN RTCs. I haven't seen these on ebay, at least not for a while. Pity, as I would like some spares. One day, I will attempt to hack in to one of these RTCs, and see if I can attach a new battery to it.

Could you please tell me how you fixed the wires to the black battery holder thingy?

You are supposed to use a soldering iron and tin-solder for that.

Now I'll only need to figure out how to do that polarity thing right. I was never any good at this (always good with maths, but often getting the + and - wrong hehe) but I figured 50% isn't too bad of a chance anyway 😜.

If you know what terminals on the battery are + and/or -, then:

Pin 1 should be the red wire, which in turn should connect to + on the battery
Pin 4 should be the black wire, which should connect to -