The onboard ide controller on this board is cancer and you are better off using a raid card, check the traces on the board and make sure that nothing is cut. Socket 4 boards are crazy rare 😒

I did a continuity test, it looks good. I'm considering rewiring the paths just in case, but I do not know if this is a good idea.

Just try the board with a raid card first.

I do not have such. Besides IDE controler is not the problem. It runs OK, I just cannot enter CMOS setup.

I wouldn't recommend doing anything you aren't sure about. Having screwed up some similar projects myself, I'd save that as an absolute last resort. If continuity is okay, the traces should be fine.

Check the board front and back for any bits of dust, solder or anything else that could have gotten stuck to the board while you were working on it. I've had a single carpet fiber stuck to the back of a board prevent it from booting.

I can't count how many devices I've fixed by simply going over the back of the board with a tooth brush.

Unfortunately it did not help. It's driving me nuts, everything works except entry to CMOS. It even detected a small HDD and started a system from it... I just cannot get into bios to set date and time and manually set my bigger HDD.

Does it have a built-in CMOS utility at all ?
The original PC/AT required a setup floppy, for example.

Jo22 wrote:

Does it have a built-in CMOS utility at all ?
The original PC/AT required a setup floppy, for example.

It does, got two batman boards and as hightreason has said these boards are a pain in the ass. These boards are very strange even the serial ports are not standard on some of them. OP should be able to change the date and time in windows, as for wanting to use a bigger drive op might have to resort to some tricks.

Yes it has a CMOS utility and I used it before. When the battery died I could still enter the setup, but the settings were not saved (which is to be expected). I then left the system for about 2 weeks, reworked the RTC and the problem occurred - hard lock upon entering the setup. So far nothing works, I cleaned the board, replace the chip, changed ram, removed unused hardware. I can boot the system using small hdd with no problems, can flash and backup the bios. The default settings loaded after battery removal also seems to be correct and persistent.

Once the system asked me for a password, but it did not occur again.

And yes, the CMOS utility is very limited, it does not show deteced CDROM's, the settings are very limited, support for large HDD's is also very poor.

xboingx wrote:

I then left the system for about 2 weeks, reworked the RTC and the problem occurred - hard lock upon entering the setup. So far nothing works, I cleaned the board, replace the chip, changed ram, removed unused hardware. I can boot the system using small hdd with no problems, can flash and backup the bios. The default settings loaded after battery removal also seems to be correct and persistent.

Once the system asked me for a password, but it did not occur again.

Aha! So the issues started after the RTC had been changed ?
Maybe the CMOS contains nonse data the BIOS utility can'te cope with.
I had a similar issue with an old laptop - Its LCD always went dark after boot up.
It was no hardware failure, though. The BIOS utility always showed a low brightness setting and changes weren't saved.
Other settings were not affected. After I cleared the CMOS everything was fine again. 😀

I've attached this utility for you, in case you want to give it a try.

IT WORKS!

Your utility did not work however it pointed me into the right direction. I found 2 small utilities for 286/386 computers that allows bios setup from MSDOS. I cannot tell which one actually worked, I think that GSETUP, as I run it first.

When run It showed some strange dates and times like 84th of 67th month of year 21312932197. After setting correct date using GSetup (and than confirming it with the other utility) I could enter the BIOS!

I have found the utilities at http://ibm-pc.org/utilities/system/system.htm. I also attach them for future usage if any one is facing the problem.

All in all it really made the memory contents bogus and the system panicked. Funny thin is that in other computer the chip worked perfectly. Thank you all for help!

Interressting.

Have you tryed the clear cmos jumper before?

Have you tryed to remove/disconnect the new installed battery from the RTC chip to let the bios forget the stored data again?

Yes, multiple times. For me it is very strange but at least it works.

I know this is an old post, but I just want to say thank you to xboingx. I had the exact issue with my Premier/PCI (Batman's Revenge) not entering the CMOS setup and freezing. I used the GSETUP utility to set the date, restarted, and now I'm in the CMOS setup! 😁

Now I need to repair that Dallas DS12887.

Photos for fun! 🤣

I think that heatsink requires an explanation.

jmarsh wrote:

I think that heatsink requires an explanation.

Know what's rarer than an So4 board? A decent So4 heatsink 😜

dionb wrote:

jmarsh wrote:

I think that heatsink requires an explanation.

Know what's rarer than an So4 board? A decent So4 heatsink 😜

Bingo! I think I have an Dell OEM socket 4 heatsink somewhere, but couldn't find it, so this Pentium 4 era Dell heatsink did the trick for a quick test of the board.

@xboingx - THANKS xboingx!!!! 😁 😁 😁 The GSETUP utility saved my A$$ too. Thanks for uploading it!

Now my Batman has got back its wings! 😁 The P60 was saved from getting recycled.

Jesus, that poor cpu is literally battle-scarred.