I have recently acquired an old Pentium 90 pc. I have seen the pc working (in Windows 95) when I picked it up, and have used it about an hour in Windows 95 at home. Afterward, however, some issues showed up. I marked them in bold underline below if you prefer not reading the entire explanation.

Reinstalling Windows 95 went without any problems. But while rebooting, in the brief moment between the BIOS and the Windows splash screen, I saw lots of garbled white text on a black background. I believe that text _should_ be the table the BIOS normally shows, with information regarding the disk drives, COM and LPT ports etc. This text was spread all over the screen. I think I also saw this _before_ reinstalling Windows.

When in Windows, I also saw that the device manager showed the floppy drive as a 5.25" one, even though in the BIOS it is correctly set as a 3.5" one. The floppy disk controller was shown with an exclamation mark. I have partially resolved this by following the suggestion in HELP: ASUS-P54SP4 Floppy drive type is wrong in dos ONLY when booting from HDD to set the DRIVPARM. This makes the floppy drive usable, but at a slower speed. Note that that suggestion mentions a possible relation with the Dallas RTC module.

Some time afterward, however, the system started to refuse booting: it now mentions a failed hard drive and a CMOS battery error. Neither of these errors were shown during the hours before.

It is clear to me that the CMOS battery error, and probably the floppy issue, are related to the Dallas RTC module. And I assume the hard drive may in fact be faulty: I will be trying another one soon. But I was wondering whether the garbled BIOS text and floppy controller exclamation mark could reasonable be explained by the Dallas RTC module as well? Or are they a sign that there may be some other issue with this motherboard, and it may be advisable to look for another one rather than spend too much effort on hacking the Dallas RTC module.

Thanks in advance for your insights!