After reading the ‘Share in my geek euphoria’ thread i remembered the old computer i had called the ‘Elonex pc-420x’ and i wondered if i could do anything with it. So i reattached the monitor and plunged it into the mains. however it has come up with a confusing display about the cpu type witch if i ignore it says boot failure no boot device connected. As i still have the ‘viglen microsoft windows versionn3.0a’ floppy disks i decided to put the first one of them in however it came up with a message saying non-system disk or disk error. i dont have a clue what that means so i thought i would ask here dose anyone know what i could do to it to make it work?
The battery that keeps the CMOS setting has likely worn out. So now the computer can no longer remember important things like the CPU settings and boot device settings.
The motherboard likely has a button style battery for the CMOS. Hopefully the battery is replaceable and not hardwired to the motherboard. Replace the battery with a new one. Then reconfigure the CMOS settings and you should be able to boot again.
But be aware that floppy disks aren’t stable storage media. They can spontaneously got bad after a decade. So even if you get the computer working you may not be able to boot or read the old Windows 3.0 floppy disks.
A while ago I made disk images of all the floppies I want to keep. Things like old DOS 3.2 installation disks and old data files I want to keep. Then I saved those floppy disk images on CD. If a floppy goes bad I can create a new one from the disk image. I can even read the disk images by mounting them in a virtual floppy drive.
Thanks for the help I’ll give it a try.