Gateway 2000 P4D-66 – Update (Problem Solved)

My computer issue has been solved (see previous blog post)!!! I found a CMOS chip that has an onboard battery. The problem was definitely a dead internal CMOS battery. When I ordered the first replacement chip, it was not clear if the chip had an internal battery. Even after receiving it, based on documentation, it was still not clear if the new chip had a battery. I now know that it did not. In addition, there was not enough information on the original chip to know if it had a battery or not. It did. It was dead, and that was my problem. But it was all unclear at the time. After some contemplation and some searching online, I found a chip that specifically stated it had an onboard battery. I took a guess that maybe the old one did, too.  When the new chip arrived, I installed it and the battery error was gone. Yay!! For reference, below is the old chip’s information and the new chip’s information. Old Clock Chip: Dallas DS12887 Real Time 9414AZ 044328 Korea 230AA (On bottom of the chip) New Clock Chip: Dallas DS12887A Real Time 13256F 390245 Phillippines + Ah, but my troubles were not over.  Even though the battery error was gone, my machine would not boot.  I got two errors: “2F8h IRQ Com Conflict” and “Failure Fixed Disk 0” For several hours, I rummaged through old boxes and piles of floppy disks (remember those?), looking for installation help. I had a lot of custom configuration with this machine to support a larger hard drive, SCSI, and everything else. It seemed to me (via some faint memory) that I had to do something custom with BIOS to get the hard drive to work. It was a long time ago and my brain is getting old. Playing around with BIOS setting, I did solved the IRQ error by disabling the COM B port. I don’t use it, and it seems to me (again via some faint memory) that maybe it was previously disable.  (Oh, the woes of changing your CMOS chip.  Nothing like loosing your BIOS setting, especially on an old machine.) Now to solve the fixed drive problem.  There was a lot of trial and error. Eventually, in the BIOS settings, I found a setting that did the trick. Under the “Advanced” menu by changing the “Large Disk Access Mode:” to [Other] (versus [DOS]), this caused the fixed disk to be recognized. The machine booted up. Yay!!! Because computer also had EZ-BIOS load on it (which I forgot about) to handle the large hard drive, EZ-BIOS took over after the normal BIOS was done, and everything booted up just fine.  The Gateway 2000 P4D-66 came back to life. All is right in the world again, and I have my favorite scanner back.