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paulsherwin · 25th Apr 2018, 7:08 pm

My guess would be that the motherboard battery has failed and the CMOS configuration is corrupt. I can't remember if these use a 3.6V NiCd or a lithium cell like a CR2032. You can do a quick bodge with a couple of AA or AAA cells in a holder.

This is a very old computer indeed to be in everyday use and a migration is long overdue. PS/2s mostly ran OS/2 which can be installed on much more modern hardware, though it's obsolete and unsupported now. A few of the cheap models ran W3.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2

As others have said you need a setup floppy to configure the CMOS. If you don't fix the battery the issue will reappear after powering off. These machines used early IDE drives, but configuring them required you to select a disk type number or CHS values which was an absolute pain. If you're lucky the info will be on the drive label.

25th Apr 2018, 7:08 pm	#4
paulsherwin Moderator Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Oxford, UK Posts: 27,940	Re: IBM Model 50 My guess would be that the motherboard battery has failed and the CMOS configuration is corrupt. I can't remember if these use a 3.6V NiCd or a lithium cell like a CR2032. You can do a quick bodge with a couple of AA or AAA cells in a holder. This is a very old computer indeed to be in everyday use and a migration is long overdue. PS/2s mostly ran OS/2 which can be installed on much more modern hardware, though it's obsolete and unsupported now. A few of the cheap models ran W3.1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2 As others have said you need a setup floppy to configure the CMOS. If you don't fix the battery the issue will reappear after powering off. These machines used early IDE drives, but configuring them required you to select a disk type number or CHS values which was an absolute pain. If you're lucky the info will be on the drive label.