Can I leave the battery off on 8088 and 80286 systems?

[seaken]

I 've watched a few videos where the Varta battery is cut off the motherboard of an 8088 or 80286. As far as I can tell it is okay to leave the battery off. I will just have to enter the date and time when the OS starts up. Is that correct? Can I leave the motherboard without a battery?

Seaken

 

[Chromedome45]

Normally most 8088 systems configurations are set by DIP swithces. No battery involved. A 286 system should have a battery to set HD parameters and other options besides date and time.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I've watched a few videos where the Varta battery is cut off the motherboard of an 8088 or 80286.

Out of curiosity, what kind of 8088 machine had one of these batteries on the motherboard? "Standard" XT machines don't have NVRAM or clocks, although I suppose some clones might.

As for leaving the battery off in an 80286, no, that's not going to leave you with a happy computer. In addition to maintaining the real time clock the battery powers a small chunk of static RAM that maintains data on things like what floppy drives and video card you have installed, hard disk geometry, etc. You might *sort* of get away with it on a very late model 80286 that has a BIOS new enough to automatically query an installed IDE drive about its geometry so the loss of the stored data isn't *that* big of a deal, but you're still going to get an angry error message and "F1 to Continue!" on every power cycle.

 

[seaken]

Ahh, very good. That is something I did not know. I am probably incorrect about the Varta on an 8088. I am probably thinking only of 286. I have experienced the F1 to Continue before. I have one 286 where I enter the BIOS each time I boot and reset to the correct setting and then it works fine. Presumably, if I update the battery that procedure will not be needed. I have another, an IBM XT-286 where I have to use F1 each time to boot. But it seems to work otherwise. That system does not use a Varta type battery but a little battery pack with a little access door in the back.

Thank you both for your instruction.

Seaken

 

[sorphin]

Ahh, very good. That is something I did not know. I am probably incorrect about the Varta on an 8088. I am probably thinking only of 286. I have experienced the F1 to Continue before. I have one 286 where I enter the BIOS each time I boot and reset to the correct setting and then it works fine. Presumably, if I update the battery that procedure will not be needed. I have another, an IBM XT-286 where I have to use F1 each time to boot. But it seems to work otherwise. That system does not use a Varta type battery but a little battery pack with a little access door in the back.

Thank you both for your instruction.

Seaken

You're not mistaken. I have a few 8088 based machines myself that had batteries on them. One of which is the dumpster find cordata cs45 that I have. I actually had to cut the battery off of it cuz it was getting ready to leak everywhere. The battery unlike on a 286 iand higher was strictly for the built-in RTC that is set via their DOS driver.

 

[Plasma]

I have an Emerson XT with an onboard DS1287 (directly soldered ) and integrated BIOS setup. I think it's not uncommon for late 80s cheap clones.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Just move the battery off the motherboard to a safe place where it can't do any harm if it leaks. Lithium primary cells are less prone to leakage than alkaline or carbon-zinc--and much less prone than old rechargeable NiCd or NiMH cells. On my old systems, the batteries are off-board in a sealed plastic bag.