This thread saved another guy's day! 😎

http://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=279998

THANKS to XboinX!

you saved my day 😀

Gsetup did the job and now my Mercury Mainboard is running again!

Heh, I thought that I broke something when I was cutting into the RTC chip straight on the motherboard (without de-soldering it first). Glad that the trick worked for you all.

Hello, I came across this thread while looking for a solution to the same issue. I have downloaded the two utilities and will test them tomorrow. Thank you, the problem was driving me crazy.

Greetings from Spain!

As many people here also will need to hack their Dallas chip I will make a suggestion.

Don't drill, stab, cut or scrape your way into the Dallas package (when doing the mod without removing it from the board).

Melt your way inside with a soldering iron, it's a 1... 99% foolproof method. Just make sure you know where to melt and that you have decent ventilation... and don't use your favorite tip.

Tunguska wrote on 2023-04-21, 16:34:

Hello, I came across this thread while looking for a solution to the same issue. I have downloaded the two utilities and will test them tomorrow. Thank you, the problem was driving me crazy.

Greetings from Spain!

WORKSSS. THXXXX

Add a socket to your board if you got the tools - in the long run this may save you a lot of hassle and keep everything looking nice.

And another success story. 😀 A big thanks!

dionb wrote on 2019-05-09, 11:15:

jmarsh wrote:

I think that heatsink requires an explanation.

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

Damn right.

I have been a lurker on Vogons for years - yet for some reason I have never made an account. This thread has prompted me to.

THANK YOU!

I just spent 4 hours trying to figure out why machine that I just replaced the RTC in would not boot. And guess what kind of board it is? Yep, Socket 4 Pentium 60.

With mine, I COULD enter the BIOS setup, but when I tried to boot anything other than the floppy, things would freeze. I specifically added in a Promise 133TX2 card that worked fine before the RTC replacement, and it would not pick up the BIOS ROM for the card. Likewise, a PCI video card would not work either. I spent 3 hours going over the board with my microscope, swearing I must have killed a trace somewhere.. But I found nothing.

When I first booted, the time field had some strange data in it - specfically when I tried to set the date, it said something like "0090 87 Set Separator DO NOT MODIFY!" as the existing value. This made zero sense to me.

After ruling out everything hardware, I was about to give up, until I found this thread.

GSETUP DID IT. My dates did not look weird, but I entered them again using this program. The machine booted up IMMEDIATELY afterward. Funny thing is I remember using this program on my literal old 386DX when it was current back in the day.

One thing to note, I replaced the 12887 with a 12887A equivalent, which seems to have an extra pin at Pin 21, bar RCLR. I had to bend this pin away on the replacement. I'm assuming this also may be why the CMOS clear jumper doesn't work?

Either way, ANOTHER SOCKET 4 BOARD SAVED. Thank you, thank you!!!!

xboingx wrote on 2016-07-13, 08:28:

IT WORKS! […]
Show full quote

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!

Thanks!
It works with my Batman @PODP5V133