stephen_usher wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 6:51 pm
Did you try hacking the RTC chip onto the board in the end?
I didn't in the end as the legs looked pretty skanky, however the replacement parts arrived whilst I was at work today!!!
As I was in London for work today, I didn't get home until gone 19:00, but after chatting with the other half, headed up to the workshop to 'de-compress' at around 21:00
I set to work prepping everyting, including making 2 new 'pads' out of flattened kynar wire for the I2C connections, feeding into their original connecting vias:
- PXL_20220525_200006399.jpg (312.87 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
Shortly after this photo, pad number 8 fell off when I tried to tin it, a further victim of the battery leak!! Next the remaining pad for C153 then fell off when I tried to solder the new capacitor to it!!
Undeterred, I carried on and finished bodge wiring the damaged traces for the RTC/CMOS IC:
- PXL_20220525_211148201.jpg (335.43 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
Then I checked that pin 8 had 5v as expected (it did) before adding in the new IC:
- PXL_20220525_221113226.jpg (392.06 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
Bear in mind the IC is only 6mm x 7mm, so you can get an idea of the area I've been working in. It'll get a clean with IPA tomorrow in case you were wondering.
I powered on, but was still getting POST flashes from the FDD LED, so popped them into the decoder to find that they were normal status codes and the CMOS error was gone. Still no boot, and as one of the errors related to memory, I thought I'd try popping in the RAM expansion to see if it helped. Boy did it help!!
Suddenly I have Supervisor mode!!
- PXL_20220525_213650286.jpg (163.35 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
I typed 'desktop' and hit return to get this:
- PXL_20220525_214133020.jpg (210.78 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
And the FDD seems to have stopped sending me POST codes and is trying to boot. Hmmm, progress!! I like progress
So I looked up how to reset the CMOS on the A5000, and it is relatively simple, just hold down 'delete' on boot to clear. Floppy flickers again like it's trying to boot, and now this:
- PXL_20220525_214432177.jpg (162.81 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
Attaching the mouse with no ball (See the earlier pic of a disintegrated pile of bits that used to be a ball!!) I manipulated the horizontal and vertical rollers and open the configuration panel:
- PXL_20220525_215039776.jpg (181.72 KiB) Viewed 1463 times
Woo hoo, we have life!!!
So tonight I'm very happy with the progress, it really has made me smile
There is still work to do, as it does need a battery to retain the settings, however I do have some rechargeable CR2032s that might just fit the bill. If not I'll order in a proper replacement.
It's not seemingly detecting the HDD either, but that may either be some damage I haven't found/fixed yet, or possibly some configuration operation I've yet to do. Possibly even a dead HDD.
I'll settle for this though, it's a good start!