Is it still misbehaving like that with the old Dallas chip (just to make sure the new RTC is the culprit) ?

There should be a "clear CMOS" jumper somewhere on the board which must be closed once after having replaced the Dallas chip. This will zap the contents of the Dallas chip and makes sure that there is no data that the BIOS may interpret wrongly.

computerguy08 wrote:

Is it still misbehaving like that with the old Dallas chip (just to make sure the new RTC is the culprit) ?

When I inserted the old RTC things work like they should apart from the fact that no settings are saved since the battery is dead.

derSammler wrote:

There should be a "clear CMOS" jumper somewhere on the board which must be closed once after having replaced the Dallas chip. This will zap the contents of the Dallas chip and makes sure that there is no data that the BIOS may interpret wrongly.

That´s a good suggestion, I hadn´t thought of that. I checked the documentation I found online and there is indeed such a jumper. I´ll not be able to check this in almost 2 weeks because of work but I´ll give it a shot as soon as possible 😀

Now for another thing with this PC. Whenever the configuration is wrong, such as incorrect number of floppy/hard drives installed it will automatically boot into the BIOS. However I can see no way to do this manually if everything works like it should. Does anyone know how this works? It does not have a regular BIOS like most computers, instead it seems that the BIOS setup is loaded from a hidden partition on the hard drive. I think perhaps some sort of special setup floppy disk is needed for this?

Just a small update for posterity in case anyone else has similar problems. The clear CMOS jumper was indeed there on the motherboard but it wasn´t actually a jumper, just 2 solder points that could be shorted. I spent some time fiddling with back and forth of Dallas chips and clearing the CMOS to no avail, still memory problems and extremely slow booting. In the end I found out that the dedicated memory is probably for the "shadow BIOS and Video RAM" options in the BIOS, after setting these to on everything worked just fine and now it boots fast like it should and no ugly beeping from the PC speaker.

I also bought a replacement Dallas chip with replaceable battery from Glitchworks for ease of battery replacement down the line: https://www.tindie.com/products/glitchwrks/gw … acement-module/

As for being able to enter the BIOS that can be done by pressing CTRL+ALT+U while the message "Region ID delay" is showing while counting down from 5, and I was also able to make a new boot/setup disk from the BIOS so now I have the neccesary tools in case the hard drive should die. The BIOS/setup program is located on a hidden partition so that disk is indeed very important as a backup 😲

Dear friend could you upload setup disk image or system utilitiea here?i have m300-30/p with dead dallas as yours.please 😀

Arvid wrote on 2019-11-20, 16:17:

I recently bought a Olivetti M300-30, when I booted it up I found that the BIOS battery was dead. Opening up the case it turns o […]
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I recently bought a Olivetti M300-30, when I booted it up I found that the BIOS battery was dead. Opening up the case it turns out to be a Dallas RTC chip inside, luckily it is socketed so it was easy to remove. I ordered a new one from RS Online (it was a DS12887A), they had several different version so I just randomly picked one because I could not tell any difference from the info provided and they were not very expensive so I wanted to give it shot. When I installed the new one it works...kind of. It´s able to remember time and date and other settings adter being switched off but it boots extremely slowly and the memory counting at boot in addition to being slow is not able to detect all the memory. It only found 512kb of the 640kb base memory. In addition it will not find what is called Dedicated memory (see suplied screenshot) at all. I have no idea what this dedicated memory is?
How do I find out which Dallas RTC chip I need to get this system working correctly again? There seems to be many variants of the DS12887A chip.

To make things more confusing I found this document https://secure.corradoroberto.it/doc/olivettt … tems1/cap36.pdf for the M300-30 and this lists the RTC chip as a MCCS14681. Googling this number it seems to be a motorola chip with pretty much the same function as a Dallas chip.

This is the original chip:
20191030_185152.jpg

The new chip I bought:
20191118_102119.jpg

Boot screen:
20191118_103448.jpg

Dear friend could you upload setup disk image or system utilities here? i have m300-30/p with dead dallas as yours.please

It would be great if Arvid could upload image of the diagnostics diskette here, for the sake of keeping Retro tools alive.

Could you please?

Thanks for files to Olivrea.de site admin Heiko.He has got a big olivetti archive.

Sorry for not answering here, haven´t been to Vogons for some time now. It seems you found what you needed after all without my help?

Arvid wrote on 2020-07-31, 15:35:

Sorry for not answering here, haven´t been to Vogons for some time now. It seems you found what you needed after all without my help?

If you have original hdd image it would be great.With ghost or acronis like image utility. 😀 ı found original diskette images ( Imagedisk format)

Kotu Koylu wrote on 2020-07-31, 19:03:

If you have original hdd image it would be great.With ghost or acronis like image utility. 😀 ı found original diskette images ( Imagedisk format)

I believe I made a image with Ghost earlier, I´ll try to remember to check in two weeks time when I´m home again 😀

Kotu Koylu wrote on 2020-07-30, 22:52:

Thanks for files to Olivrea.de site admin Heiko.He has got a big olivetti archive.

I have aquired an Olivetti m300-30p and i'm having a lot of trouble to write the *.imd files on 1.44mb Disks.

My head is about to blow...

Can someone just put here the images already extrated or in a IMG formar?

Lost an entire day around This IMD shity file format..

Come on..

Ok. I finally did manage to get the setup software on a disk using the imdu /b command to build a .bin file and them used winimage to burn the disk.

Well the BIOS is so Basic. I can Change almost nothing.. i have the 1.04 i Guess..and my cpu gets detected as a dx2-25 MHz and the RAM os always 8mb no matter how many simms i install.

Now i having a new battle. How to get a BIOS update?

nuno14272 wrote on 2021-03-26, 23:46:

Ok. I finally did manage to get the setup software on a disk using the imdu /b command to build a .bin file and them used winimage to burn the disk.

Well the BIOS is so Basic. I can Change almost nothing.. i have the 1.04 i Guess..and my cpu gets detected as a dx2-25 MHz and the RAM os always 8mb no matter how many simms i install.

Now i having a new battle. How to get a BIOS update?

İf you want to update bios your RTC must work