First post, by xboingx
Hi there,
I'm facing another problem with my Batman's Revenge motherboard. I set up the system and all worked well, unfortunately the day after the final setup the RTC battery failed. It was a Dallas DS12887 soldered to the motherboard. After some consideration I decided to rework it in place without desoldering. That of course was a bad idea.
First I tried to use a very sharp knife to cut to the pins, but it didn't work so well so I used very small saw to cut of the top of the chip. It worked well, but than on the closer look I noticed that the first attempts using the knife left some cuts on the board.
The reworked chip works, when I start the system I get info about wrong date and time, press F1 and then the cursor disappears and the computer freezes. When I pres ESC I can boot using floppy successfully. I checked the RTC with other motherboard, I also tried to use different working chip. On the other host I can enter CMOS setup and store settings without any problems.
On this motherboard I cannot, the system hard locks as soon as it tries to enter BIOS setup. Without that I cannot set proper parameters for my harddrive (it's to big to be detected and the system hangs with it, I'm using ez-drive on it). Starting from the floppy allows the system to start, all seems to work correctly, all memory is detected, the display is ok, I managed to backup, reflash and verify the BIOS without any errors. However the computers hardlocks as soon as it enters the BIOS setup.
I did continuity test on all damaged paths using a multimeter. It beeps every time so I assume the paths are ok. Using a magnifying glass I can see that the coating is damaged but the paths look ok so I assume the communication between the chip and the computer should work.
Any ideas what can be done? I my try to add secondary paths using a wires soldered to mounting points to make sure that all the paths are connected.
Testing of the motherboard is quite troublesome as I need to desolder the socket for the chip to be able to see the paths and nearest soldering points or passages to the other side of the board when I can attach a multimeter or add some cables.
Could it be that this was only a coincidence? Could I damage something else in the process? I'm fairly sure I didn't damage anything else.
Any advice will be appreciated. Socket 4 boards are quite hard to find in my country for a reasonable price and this one works well minus the CMOS setup.