I plugged in my old 386 machine to use my old software on 5 and 1/4 disks and nothing much happens. I think i goofed by changing th AA batteries with the machine off. Nothing happens except it sounds like the hard drive spins a little bit (maybe it stops then?). I have disks for the A drive but it never looks there at all. The screen is blank. I really wanted to see if i have all my old files from this great machine. i have some old backups on tape that i'll try on another old 386 machine when i fix that one. I heard a long time ago 199X that if the cmos loses power it won't boot. Is that true? Maybe I could leave it on and the hard drive might boot up. any ideas. thanks this is a gateway 386 with 4mb 33mhz.100mb hard drive. I added a sound card and cd rom drive during the olympics about 8 years ago. No problem during the install. Had a virus checker running IBM back then. Maybe the y2k thing killed the computer? I always set the date way before 2000 no matter what the real date was. thanks

You need to check out (and if required correct) the bios, as when power is lost, some parameters can reset to their default values, including those for the hdd, such that it is then unable to be accessed. Although it should boot of a floppy. Would not expect a blank screen though. Are you able to test it elsewhere? Good Luck - Keep us posted.

The really old PC had a function to reset the CMOS by holding the insert key on keyboard and then power on the PC. This will reset the CMOS to factory default. This may work for you. Please send a reply, if you solved the problem !!!

>>>Nothing happens except it sounds like the hard drive spins a little bit (maybe it stops then?). I have disks for the A drive but it never looks there at all. The screen is blank.<<< The blank screen is not a good sign. Even if the CMOS/BIOS were reset when you changed the batteries, it should display something, prompting you to either tap a key or insert a diskette to gain access to Setup. If it's been sitting around for a good while, open up the case and pull out all cards and RAM modules and re-seat them. If you don't have luck there, you may have to pull the old 5 1/4" FDD out of it and install it into the "tape-drive' machine you spoke of earlier. Also, don't expect those 5 1/4" floppies/tapes to have survived the years all that well. Older magnetic media tends to break down over the years if not kept in ideal conditions. Should you get them working, I'd strongly advise that you back up their data to something more durable (CD or DVD) >>>I heard a long time ago 199X that if the cmos loses power it won't boot......Maybe the y2k thing killed the computer?<<< "No", and "Not likely" respectively, and even if there was some y2k problem (which would only be a minor issue, not enough to "kill" a machine), you could always set the date to prior to 1/1/2000. Out of all the machines I use routinely (12 in all) all but two of them were made prior to Y2K (one of them a Compaq Portable II made in 1987) and none of them have any Y2K issues...

Thank you. Thank you everyone. I will try everything. Thanks for the insert key tip, but it didn't work on this machine. I do think it has a self-correcting feature, but again it doesn't boot etc. It is true that it appears that the drive spins a bit. I'm going to remove everything and "set" everything back in place. I'm sure the motherboard isn't fried because i hear the cd rom spin for a bit also, but the floppies don't spin at all. The memory modules are firmly in place and i'm not sure i can get them out. The hard drive by the way was an ESDI drive not the popular IDE. I will also get another 386 working with old dos and windows disks. With another 386 i will attempt to move the hard drive to this slower machine to see if the hard drive works. I've never moved or installed a hard drive before, but i'll follow the cables etc. My tape backup is an old Colorado 120mb drive which uses the parallel port. Without a DOS prompt or any video i can't use it on this machine plus it doesn't boot from that port. My old 5 and quarter software (like Ultima 1-5, Links etc.) are so old people find them on abandonware sites. Again thanks everyone, but the computer will sit for a little bit until i get my act together with my wife and find our tax paperwork. wish me luck at that situation.

Just a couple of (unsolicited) comments... >>>I'm sure the motherboard isn't fried because i hear the cd rom spin for a bit also, but the floppies don't spin at all. The memory modules are firmly in place and i'm not sure i can get them out. <<< Drives spinning/not spinning up and down have little to do with the condition of the MoBo. All you know is that at least the motor (likely +12V) is getting what it needs. The memory may be firmly in place, but corrosion or alloy differences can make a machine "wacko": http://books.google.com/books?id=eV... And, unless they're of some oddball design, they should be fairly easy to remove: http://books.google.com/books?id=KV... What would better determine the condition of the MoBo would be a display of some kind on the monitor (which you're not getting) or the presence/absence of beeps from the PC speaker (and depending on the BIOS, different beeps mean different things...): http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beep... >>>The hard drive by the way was an ESDI drive not the popular IDE. I will also get another 386 working with old dos and windows disks. With another 386 i will attempt to move the hard drive to this slower machine to see if the hard drive works. I've never moved or installed a hard drive before, but i'll follow the cables etc.<<< Not trying to be a smarta**, but if I read the above correctly, you may be going about that backwards. It'd be better to move the suspect machine's drive into a working machine than vice-versa (i.e.--don't move working devices into a suspect machine). If there were a severe P/S or MoBo issue (which damages the drives/cards/etc.) in the machine, then you could just fry the drive you move into it. Also, if you move an MFM, RLL or ESDI drive to an IDE machine, then you'd need to move the controller card as well, and disable any onboard-controller on the machine you're moving the drives to. MFM's and RLL's were notoriously finicky about being moved (and maybe ESDI's, just never worked with many of them). If you've never done a lot with the innards of a PC before (and neither of the 386's or their drives are "disposable"), you may want to have it done by a tech who's familiar with such... >>>My tape backup is an old Colorado 120mb drive which uses the parallel port. Without a DOS prompt or any video i can't use it on this machine plus it doesn't boot from that port.<<< There may be software available to recover the files using Win9x for the parallel-port tape drive. You may want to hunt around on HP's web site (which bought Colorado eons ago), but I had a similar situation (backing up old tape data to newer media), so I setup a dual-boot (DOS 6.22/Win95) system which read the tapes to a HDD directory (using the old Colorado Backup for DOS and a floppy-based Jumbo tape drive), and then rebooted afterwards to Win95 to back the data up again to CD-R (using an older version of Adaptec CD Creator)... I guess the real question is what you're planning on doing with this machine (data recovery, rebuild, or just plain old nostalgia) if you get it running. There may be an easier/cheaper way to accomplish your goal...

I have an HP machine of which the BIOS only knows about diskette format as high as 1M2 and below. When i wanted to replace its 5¼" floppy drive with the newer 1M4 3½" this forced me to format my 3½" diskette as 1M2 3½" hybrids to make them bootable... I also recall that one of the ones i made had a utility to restore the CMOS table because i was tired of going through this again and again. There are two types of PCs: the "compatibles" and the clones". The "compatibles" mean trouble, i kept away from those all i could after that. ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Salutations, Michel Samson a/s Bicéphale