On 1 Feb 2007 14:58:45 -0800, "
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I just installed a 486 board that someone gave me to replace a failed
386 into an old machine. There are programs on this machine that we
still use. The 486 board has Phoenix bios. Initially the setup option,
(F2) ...

I thought Ctrl-S or Ctrl-Alt-Esc were the appropriate keys.

... came up during post and allowed me to get into the bios to set
the drives up and the date. I did that and exited saving the
information. My 386 machine used an MFM controller board and I
plugged it into the new 486. The 486 however has an on board IDE
controller which it now occurs eto me perhaps should have been
disabled. So now when I try to boot it counts the ram and displays a
cache message but I get this message that reads : "last boot failed,
use default configuration". I assume that the default configuration is
part of bios but the problem is that the F2 option on startup is now
gone and I can't seem to get back into bios. I tried disconnecting the
battery and shorting across the ternminals on the board, and even
pulling the bios chip and shorting all the pins on a pad of aluminum
foil thinking that this may dump the memory, ...

The *nonvolatile* BIOS chip is either an EPROM or flash EEPROM. The
*volatile* CMOS RAM is probably in the chipset or in an RTC chip. The
latter is battery backed, the former is not.

... but nothing will get me
back. Does anyone know of a way to get back into bios after the
option no longer presents itself. Thanks very much for any assistance,
Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Boot from a floppy, and then trash the CMOS RAM contents using DOS
debug.exe, as described he

http://groups.google.com/group/aus.e...dc603565850034

- Franc Zabkar
--
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