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BIOS problem with a Gateway2000 P5-66 Socket 4 machine.

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Unknown_K

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I have a Gateway2000 P5-66 Socket 4 desktop I am having issues with.

When I turned it on it complained about the CMOS battery being low, and this unit has a soldered-on Dallas DS-12887 chip. Also, it would end booting at "Enter current Password" prompt and then lock up with no further keyboard input.

I desoldered the Dallas chip and installed a DS1287 (should be drop-in replacement) with a coin cell hack and while the battery low no longer comes up (and it asks for CMOS setup) it still gets stuck at the enter keyboard password and locks up.

I know the keyboard is good and I can hit F1 on boot to jump to CMOS setup, but I never get there because of the password and hang issue.

Any ideas of what is going on? The machine worked fine when I got it many years ago.
 
Possibly. It could be that, like Unix, nothing echoes as you type a password. And further, if it is reading random junk since the Dallas has 50 bytes, the password checking algorithm could be going awry.

Some Intel motherboards of that era are also known for having BIOS Setup programs that lock up when the CMOS RAM holds garbage values, such as the date and time being centuries away from today.
 
Unknown_K said:
So you think that is causing the keyboard issue?
Click to expand...
A possibility, that could be discounted by someone dissembling the motherboard BIOS to see what range of RAM addresses in the Dallas chip are being used by the BIOS.

Also of interest is the "current" in "Enter current Password". It is if the machine is in the middle of a password change operation.
 
Well, reworked the 12887 and swapped it with the other and now the machine doesn't boot at all.
 
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