Hi does anyone know where i can get a service manual to take apart a very old compaq machine as it is telling me I need to change the cmos battery, There is no OS and I need to install something on it hopefully lnux but I am not sure if this generation machine understands burnt cd's. It is not taking anything right now anyway even a genuine windows 98 cd. "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful" Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama

OK well now I got inside and I am not sure where the bios battery is. Here is what I see under the keyboard http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/... I have a red arrow to what is the only possible battery. It seems to be soldered in. "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful" Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama

Does this help? http://www.computing.net/answers/ha...

Your an absolute gem. It was where they described in that thread and the same type too!!! I am not sure what was meant about writing down the positive/negative orientation? "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful" Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama

both damn small linux & puppy have the ability to create a boot floppy. I belive if you run the live cd, form a machine with internet access and a floopy drive, you will be able to create a boot floppy larry

Yes i have tried to create those boot floppies before and was unsuccessful when I had an even old notebook. I think it was a Toshiba TXXXX. Very old. The machine does have a floppy and cd drive and I do have both the distros your talking about. The liveCD's of them! There is not ethernet port and i did have a pcmcia card that had it but just gave it away. Damn! Anyway I have to go out now and get the battery plus tonnes to do today. Will pop in the battery and go from there. "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful" Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama

Well I got the battery today but I am still getting these errors: 167-rtc lost power - replace battery and run setup if I press F1 then I get: operating system not found I have checked the bios and the date/time wasn't correct so I changed it but i am still experiencing that error. I am not 100% sure I placed the battery right. It seems to be placed right but when i tried to put it in the first time it didn't have something to hold it in place so I squeezed it in between some kind of prong thing. Can't think of the right word. The parts are so small it is hard to know how I got it out and how it was held in place before. I know there was an extra error before so maybe I am advancing non the less. Anyway had a look around here on computing.net and found this http://www.computing.net/answers/wi... I got the 'computer set up and diagnostics for portables' from here http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor... and tried to run it on the notebook but it is not responding to it. I did change the bios to boot from the floppy but nothing is happening. Any ideas? Oh yes the other error is : 102-system board failure. That has just been added to the above error. Oh bugger now I found several posts saying that the motherboard could be dead. I even found a page of the compaq errors and it said to replace the system board. Ah well I will sell it on ebay for parts unless someone comes up with some other solution. "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful" Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama