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Spent a whole weekend trying to get a 1995 Packard Bell to boot from a floppy
The thing would just give me a 'Non-system disk' error no matter what I tried. I cleaned the drive head, tried six different disks, and even swapped the ribbon cable. Turns out the CMOS battery was so dead it forgot the floppy drive type was set to 1.44MB. I found a weird jumper setting in the manual after maybe 12 hours total. Anyone know a good source for those weird barrel-style CMOS batteries now?
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stellafisher1mo ago
Wait, the battery leaked and made blue crust on the motherboard? That stuff is pure evil, how does it even do that? I've seen dead ones but never one that ate the board. Did the vinegar actually fix it, or was it just a lost cause after that kind of damage?
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theawest1mo ago
Remember my buddy Dave fighting a Compaq from that same era. He spent a whole day convinced his boot disk was bad. The machine would just spin the drive and then nothing. He finally opened it up and the CMOS battery had actually leaked. It left this weird crusty blue stuff all over the motherboard. He had to clean the whole area with vinegar before it would even think about seeing a drive.
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