UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum - View Single Post - Mostek/ST 'Timekeeper' IC (Sun NVRAM) repair

Kat Manton · 28th Jun 2011, 6:42 pm

Hi,

Ages ago I had a PC with a duff battery and it was one which had the configuration utility on floppy. Rather than replace the battery (I think it was a soldered-on NiCd), I wrote a little program in BASIC and stuck that on a bootable (5.25") floppy with DOS. This set the hard drive type (type 2, Seagate ST225; it's funny the things one remembers), asked for the date and time, then invited one to eject the floppy, then rebooted. I used it like that for months and never did replace the battery!

I'm not sure that'd be possible on a Sun. For a start, it won't boot from anything and just drops to the OpenBoot prompt if the NVRAM checksum is invalid.

These things are a lot more fun than old PCs; but "complicated" and "fun" seem to go hand-in-hand with me...

Kat

28th Jun 2011, 6:42 pm	#10
Kat Manton Retired Dormant Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: West Yorkshire, UK. Posts: 1,700	Re: Mostek/ST 'Timekeeper' IC (Sun NVRAM) repair Hi, Ages ago I had a PC with a duff battery and it was one which had the configuration utility on floppy. Rather than replace the battery (I think it was a soldered-on NiCd), I wrote a little program in BASIC and stuck that on a bootable (5.25") floppy with DOS. This set the hard drive type (type 2, Seagate ST225; it's funny the things one remembers), asked for the date and time, then invited one to eject the floppy, then rebooted. I used it like that for months and never did replace the battery! I'm not sure that'd be possible on a Sun. For a start, it won't boot from anything and just drops to the OpenBoot prompt if the NVRAM checksum is invalid. These things are a lot more fun than old PCs; but "complicated" and "fun" seem to go hand-in-hand with me... Kat