Resurrecting an i486 - BIOS needed?

Super-Slasher · Sun Jan 05, 2003 4:20 am

Okie lemme just open by saying I'm a total newbee at stuff like this. While I am very familliar with software, hardware and such, BIOS is an uncharted territory for me. I am eager to learn...

Anyways, for education purposes, I decided to take an old 1993 IBM i486SX desktop I found at the dump and turn in into my own server. It has a 1.6GB HD and floppy drive only... yet the CMOS battery was long gone. So, I got a new one put in.

When I start it up, the screen remains blank and the A drive searches for a disk.

Can anyone tell me what this means and perhaps point me in the proper direction of how to solve it? Does it need to have a BIOS loaded, and if so, how do I go about getting it and doing it?

Thanks in advance.

Sun Jan 05, 2003 12:09 pm

Try putting a boot disk there to see if it can boot. Some older IBM machines didn't have BIOS SETUP built-in but needed a special floppy to configure the settings.

Super-Slasher · Sun Jan 05, 2003 6:57 pm

But what kind of a boot disk would I need? If I'm not seeing any sort of setup at startup, doesn't that mean it's lacking a BIOS?

Mon Jan 06, 2003 3:47 pm

If you're not seeing anything it could be it doesn't know where to send the display info - some big manufacturers do things their own way.

Have you got the IBM model number for the machine ?

Super-Slasher · Mon Jan 06, 2003 8:04 pm

NickS wrote:Have you got the IBM model number for the machine ?

2155-E32

It is a 1993 IBM i486SX 33Mhz.

I trying over the possibilaties of other problems, such as incorrect jumper settings on the mboard, damaged/incorrect IDE device/floppy cable. I'm going over everything with a fine-toothed comb.