1 Oct
2008
1 Oct
'08
7:20 p.m.
On Wednesday 01 October 2008 22:03, Tony Mori wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brad Parker" <brad at heeltoe.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:24 PM
Subject: help (re) booting xenix after cmos battery failure
Some of those also had a setup partition on the HD. If a dos or similar disk
gets booted and fdisk is run (or linux equivalents) to see what's there, it
may be possible to tell, then all you need to do after battery replacement
is to get into it and tell it that what it finds in the hardware is okay. In
terms of the one old machine like that we have, what I'm remembering is that
somewhere in the powerup sequence the cursor changes from an underline to a
block and ends up over on the right side of the screen. I'm not 100% sure on
the keystroke but try looking for that behavior and hitting F10 when it does
that. If there's a setup partition in place that should dump you into it.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
A friend of a friend has an old xenix machine;
Compaq DeskPro 386
running Xenix. He shut if off after running for years and it won't
boot because the cmos battery is dead.
The disk is an ESDI drive attached to a Compaq ESDI/FLPY controller
(copyright 1989) ISA bus card.
He says can't see any way to enter a "setup" mode in the BIOS.
Anyone know how to fix this?
Those old-school machines usually required a setup disk, unlike regular
clones.
I remember using a program naemd something like 'GSETUP.EXE" or .COM on a
Compaq Portable III, and it worked fine.
I think all you need is a bootable DOS disk, with a generic setup program,
and set up the HD drive type in the BIOS.