On 17 Nov 2012 21:17:07 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2012-11-17, wrote:
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 09:06:34 -0600, Karl Townsend
wrote:

On 17 Nov 2012 05:22:24 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

[ ... ]

You may need to reset the CMOS. Pull the new battery, and short
the pins of the holder for a few seconds, then re-install the battery.
You will probably have to reset all the options after this, of course.

Good Luck,
DoN.

JOY, This was it but shorting it didn't work. leaving the battery out
all night did.

[ ... ]

Back when the RTC was a separate chip we would remove the battery and
put a peice of tinfoil over the clock chip to short out all the pins.
The clock chip contained the C-MOS in most of those older machines .

Easier than in the older Sun workstations, which used a chip by
Toshiba which had the clock, the CMOS RAM, a crystal, *and* a coin cell
potted in a single package. No way to short out the battery from
outside. *And* -- it contained the host-id and the ethernet MAC address
inside it, with no easy way to reset those. (There was an
around-the-corner way, but it was not easy.) And if you had any
licensed software, the host-id was very important. If you did not have
it recorded, you had to go to Sun for a replacement, with the barcode
from the label on the chip.

Those "integrated" CMOS devices were used on quite a few motherboards
back in the 386/486 era. Cannot remember the manufacturere - but when
the internal battery died you were cooked. I believe it was Dallas
Semi. Some could be taken apart and a new battery soldered in.
Sometimes you could cut the top off and solder wires to the 2 up-bent
pins and connect a standard c-mos battery, and some guys just replaced
the dallas with generic RTC chip -and an external battery.

Pain in the ARSE, for sure.

If you left your computer on 24/7 you would get a really long
life from the built-in battery. If you stored it powered off, you would
be lucky to get five years out of it.

And -- there were (are) instructions on the web on how to dig
into the potting and wire an external coin cell to replace the now dead
one inside it. :-)

Most I saw were not even potted - just built into a glued or welded
plastic box.

Enjoy,
DoN.