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CMOS battery in a Presario 1020

post #1 of 3
Thread Starter 
Yes, that's right ... a Presario 1020. 120Mhz Pentium, 1.08GB, 48MB EDO. It's been zipped up inside a carrying case in the tech room of our office for about eight years. It's in immaculate shape inside and out (no dust in the casing! ). Looks like it just came out of the box from Compaq. Not a scuff anywhere. Even the battery holds a charge. It has a built-in modem port with POTS line-through (or whatever it's called), PCMCIA ports, stereo sound, CDROM (probably 24X or less), floppy, and screen up to 800x600x64.

Or so I'm told. ... because the darned thing WON'T BOOT. Little .

BIOS setup will run, and it says it's saving changes to the system, except each boot shows two errors. ...

162-System Options Not Set.
102-System Board Failure.

Sounds ominous.

Then I get the F1-Boot and F10-Computer Setup options. F10 puts me back in the BIOS, while F1 sends me into this dreamlike state where the floppy spins and sometimes loads a disc, but nothing else happens. No boot from CD, no boot from hard drive.

If I can get it to load Active@'s Killdisk, I see no listing aside from the floppy. No hard drive is listed.

But if it is actually a mainboard issue, why will it boot to floppy? And if it will boot to floppy, why not CD?

And ... when I Google those errors, I see ancient threads on long-abandoned forums that suggest ithey are Compaq's way of telling me the CMOS battery is dead.

That makes sense to me. Whenever I enter the BIOS, it tells me the CMOS settings have been reset, and it's switching back to the defaults. To me, that reinforces the dead battery theory.

Now if I could only find the darn battery. I can get the speaker casing off, remove the keyboard and the video connectors, but I can't see it anywhere. If I understand right, it's the CR1220, about the size and thickness of a nickel (a US 5-cent piece), and yet there is nothing that shape or size anywhere in there. I even looked under the memory stick, thinking Compaq might have hidden it from me there.

Does anyone have experience with early Presarios that could tell me where the heck the battery is? I would hate to risk damaging a pristine computer just to pull a $1.99 battery, but right now it looks like complete disassembly is my only option. Somebody stop me!

As always, thanks in advance.

(edited: small error in machine specs)
post #2 of 3
Thread Starter 
Well, I found it. It was covered by the brace that held the keyboard in place. It sits vertically, which made it hard to find, and the battery isn't as big as I thought, which made it harder to find.

Pulled the battery and it boots perfectly ... even if I have to set the date every time I turn it on.

Next step, install Linux.

Cheers, all.
post #3 of 3
I have 2 Presarios with EXACTLY the same symptoms, and had the same trouble finding the CMOS battery. Thanks for the follow-up which explains where the crazy battery is hidden! New batteries will fix both of them<G>
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