First post, by dmlest
Hey folks -
The laptop I have here is in great physical condition, CD and floppy drives via expansion dock, and excellent LCD quality, just having issues with the CD Rom and the CMOS/System/Realtime Clock battery.
POST's but says no OS detected on its original 1.3GB HDD. Accessing from another machine looks like it functions OK, and there were files that were accessible. With the system battery dead and the main rechargeable batteries non-functional, the BIOS will reset every time. It does detect the HDD and CD-ROM drive at POST after manually initializing in the BIOS, but fails to read any CD's in a meaningful way. I can boot from a Win98 floppy, but setup fails when trying to access the CD.
Here's the CD behavior:
- Spins up, sounds like it is reading various discs. Seeks and attempts to read, though CD-R's make the stranges noises in particular. No mechanical clicks or clunks or anything like that.
- When attempting to start a Windows install, it fails at the prompt "CDR101: Not ready reading drive E, Abort, Retry, Fail?". If I eject the disc, reinsert, and choose "retry", the prompt will wait for the drive to attempt to read the disc. This indicates to me the interface is working, but something's up when obtaining the data.
It's not a removable modular drive, can I swap it with another laptop CD assembly? How standardized are 1996-era optical drives?
About the System Battery:
I did a teardown of about 75% of the laptop, and couldn't find a removable CMOS-style battery. There's one that looks like it's soldered to the board, near the RAM upgrade access bay. I'm guessing it's an ML1220 based on the shape, but where it's placed I can't see any markings.
Am I on track in thinking it's a soldered ML1220? Anyone have data on similar era Fujitsu's?
All help is welcome - just getting started in revisiting this era of computing. Let me know anything obvious I might be missing - thanks!