On 28/05/18 15:23, Nick Odell wrote:
On 28/05/18 11:46, Graeme wrote:
In message , Graeme
writes

Rootling around in the loft, I found my Elonex 386, bought in 1992,
running DOS and W3.1, so brought it downstairs and set up, but no go,
the PC itself seems to boot (fan noise, flashing lights), but no
video signal using the original monitor.

Ignore that.Â* Repeated CTL-ALT-DEL seems to have fixed the signal
problem, BUT error message tells me the internal battery (Real time
Clock) is discharged.Â* It seems that the BIOS defaults to boot from
drive A (the floppy), but I can change that to C, but, because the
battery is flat, the change is lost when rebooting, and it again tries
to boot from A.Â* No, I can't find the original boot disc, although it
must be here somewhere.

In the meantime, if I leave the PC on, will the internal battery
charge, or is it not rechargeable?Â* PC has probably not been booted
for 20 years.

Just last week I decommissioned an Elonex PC 425x. If your 386 has been
manufactured in a similar way then there will be a fairly bulky box
which has been plugged into a DiL socket on the main board. This
contains the BIOS chip and RTC battery potted in resin.

There's no way to replace the battery in this package but other people
have had success from piggy-backing a two-AA battery pack across the
relevant pins.

For what its worth, I didn't attempt to do any of this but I reclaimed
all the data by taking out the hard drive, changing the jumper-pins on
it from "Master" to "Slave" and plugging it into another computer with
IDE drives and configuring it as drive "D". Then I copied all the stuff
across from one to the other. The other computer being marginally more
modern with USB ports and the like, I then transferred everything to a
memory stick. (It didn't have to be a very big memory stick!)

Re-reading that, I realise I could have copied directly from drive "D"
to the memory stick. Doh!

Nick