Can anyone tell me what's wrong with my 486?

[metamorphy]

Im trying to teach myself computer hardware so I bought this 486 for $20 and took out all the cards, drives and memory.

I removed the SIMMS (8,30-pin banks) and reseated them. Now I get a CMOS checksum failure and its telling me 3712k memory ok. Does this mean only 3 of the 1 megabyte SIMMS are being recognized (640K + 3*1024)?? I get the same message with SIMMS in only the first 4 banks. Anyway, after this message I get: "HDD controller failure". I am almost positive my drives and cables are hooked up right. My ATA IDE is hooked into an adapter card. Could a bad memory configuration be causing the drive controller to fail? I hear a ticking when I power on which I beleive is the hard drive. I also hear the 3 1/2 floppy buzz after power on but when I try to boot from the floppy I get a "boot disk error" I downloaded DOS 6.22 from bootdisk.com--Do I need a different bootdisk? Other than that, I guess it could be the IDE controller on the hard disk board but I dont think so because I didnt really handle the drive other than unplugging the cables. Would it be a low battery?(I have one of these red things plugged into the board that I guess is supposed to be a replacement for the clock battery??? Is there a way to tell if the BIOS is shot?? I have written the autoconfigure to the cmos several times. Sometimes I change the color on the setup utility and the next time I go into the setup the color changes back; but sometimes it saves the color change. Does this mean the cmos may not be writing properly? Anybody feel like throwing out an idea......?

 

[edfair]

Battery. Then set the CMOS. Buzzing may be memory test, hit escape key and see if it bypasses.
It sounds like the onboard battery has failed and somebody plugged a replacement in. And replacements generally are good for a year or so. Onboard for 486s were generally rechargable but fail after several years so mfgs put headers on the board to disconnect the onboard and allow the external. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
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