Compaq Portable III fails POST?

Cameron Kaiser wrote: I just unpacked one that had been stored in a reasonable warehouse environment, this week, and when I pulled off the keyboard, the insulation sheathing totally disintegrated. I think they tried some sort of plastic to make the cable retain the curl, and it was not very good. I have not tested the keyboard, the later suggestion of trying another standard at is a good one. This is pretty much an AT with a 30 or so entry HD table, instead of just the AT's 15 entry table in the disk extension. As such, you need an AT setup disk to set the cmos if it is dead. It should boot and run either the compaq one, or the standard AT one. If you dont need > 15 in the drive type, the standard AT will work. A lot of these had drive type 2, which IIRC is a 20mb. Another thing that concerns me is that you need to say whether you see floppy activity, either constant (bad ps) or none at all after you boot up. You should see a floppy seek if you have a floppy installed, just like an ordinary AT would do. <snip> yes, it needs to have cmos setup program booted from floppy if (since the battery will be) is dead. They are nice 286 or 386 machines, consume much less than preserving the equivalent AT pile. Jim