Subj : Re: 286 gang
To   : boraxman
From : dingo
Date : Mon Apr 14 2025 17:39:01


On Monday, April 14th boraxman said...
 Bo> error on boot.  Not  been able to resolve the issue, but there is a bit 
 Bo> of corrosion around the motherboard where the CMOS battery was. (it 
 Bo> leaked it seems).

if it is ruined by corrosion, unless the damage is too great, you can visually inspect the traces, from which pin it is from and where it should go, and you can solder "bodge wires" to complete any traces that are incomplete. You can also solder copper wire directly onto the traces to bridge the spaces they are broken.

I say it like its easy, but I tried to repair an Apple ][+ board that had battery corrosion (from a 3rd party thunderclock card), but I put hours of work into it and there was still "something" wrong with it. Instead of buying a nice digital oscilloscope for several hundred, I repaired it by buying a fully complete, chips and all Apple ][+ board fully tested for under $100..

My first computer was a 286, and I shot it up with a bb gun during a power outage as a teenager. I wouldn't recommend a 286 for anyone... the "games" were really bad for that CGA graphics era...

You do probably have a working 5.25" disk drive, and that can be restored and 
reused with a GreaseWeazle, "The Greaseweazle board is compatible with any [..]
Standard floppy drive, that includes any 3.5 and 5.25-inch drive with a 34-pin 
connector"

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
 
You can then image from and to floppy disks for all the other 8 and 16-bit systems of the era, lots of archive.org work has been done to make these "flux" images of floppy disks available. This technique also allows
reliable duplication of "copy-protected disks"


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