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Packard Bell Legend 125 - PB410 rev. C motherboard replacement needed?

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phreakindee

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I have a bit of a request for info from anyone who can help! Just got a PB Legend 125, and it looked great until I got inside. See the album linked to for pics, but as you can see there are several areas with some serious leakage/corrosion going on around the battery. Who knows what else, it looks pretty extensive. Is there any chance of a salvage job here? The machine powers on, but I get no video, no beeps, nothing but the PSU fan and the HDD spinning.

If it is a lost cause is there anyone with a spare PB 410 rev. C motherboard? Or something comparable that would fit this case and is compatible with a 486SX/DX. I would gladly pay a fair price for it, I just want to get my childhood machine working again. Thanks guys!

PB 410 rev. C motherboard with nastiness
 
It may still be salvageable. No guarantees of course, but I've resurrected worse looking things. Soak down the area with vinegar, leave it for awhile, then clean it up with alcohol and a soft-ish brush (like an old toothbrush or similar). Then re-evaluate the situation. I'm sure there's some corrosion, but for the most part it looks like it's just the solder mask bubbled up... the traces could still be OK underneath. Even if there are a few broken lines, it looks like the worst of the damage is on the bottom side, where the traces are all accessible and can be bridged with wire if necessary.
 
Okay, well I cleaned the corrosion and also baked the motherboard for 30 minute at 160F to be sure, but I'm still stuck with the same problem. Nothing but fans and HDD spinning :/
 
Looks like you may need a couple solder's or to re-tin some of the traces there as well...

I just started doing that myself as an attempt to save things...

ON a side note, that is the machine I wanted as a kid, but instead had one built by my uncle for me....I was too young to know that the built one was more powerful, it didnt say Packard Bell!!

Ahh the power of advertising in the late 80's - early 90's to a pre-teen!

Good luck.
 
Can you provide a photo of the outside of the case? I've got two PBs in storage, but can't find a good image of a 125 to see if it jogs the memory as to whether my boxes match yours.
 
Thrash is right on about that cleanup procedure. I would add just a little baking soda to the real nasty areas with a drop or two of distilled waster, and along with that scrub very gingerly with the tooth brush. I seen worse.
 
Agent Orange said:
Thrash is right on about that cleanup procedure. I would add just a little baking soda to the real nasty areas with a drop or two of distilled waster, and along with that scrub very gingerly with the tooth brush. I seen worse.
Click to expand...

As mentioned above, I did go through the thorough cleaning process, but it's still not booting..
 
Sorry to revive an almost-year-old thread, but i found this PC lately too, but mine is a bit different than yours. Mine have the 486SX 25Mhz processor on the board directly, leaving the Overdrive socket free so i could upgrade, but then i don't know which 486 CPU could work on it...because "SX 25Mhz" is kinda weak, DX 33Mhz or 66Mhz would be awesome.

Though i had to cut off the leaking battery, and used air duster to remove any particle of acid on the board. Though the board in mine is a lot less clean than yours, but it still work fine. But i don't really want to dismantle everything and brush all around it in fear of screwing up the board. But...is there a way i could use some kind of special wipes to clean a board as good as possible without dismantling everything?
 
RaptorZX3 said:
Sorry to revive an almost-year-old thread, but i found this PC lately too, but mine is a bit different than yours. Mine have the 486SX 25Mhz processor on the board directly, leaving the Overdrive socket free so i could upgrade, but then i don't know which 486 CPU could work on it...because "SX 25Mhz" is kinda weak, DX 33Mhz or 66Mhz would be awesome.

Though i had to cut off the leaking battery, and used air duster to remove any particle of acid on the board. Though the board in mine is a lot less clean than yours, but it still work fine.
Click to expand...

That's cool that the board still works, even with the leakage. I'm still trying to find a replacement for mine!
 
those computers are nearly impossible to find nowadays, the only way to find this is to stumble on it in a flea market or a goodwill, maybe once in your lifetime...

i was able to make a cdrom drive work on it, good thing it support Master and Slave with a 40pins 3-connectors IDE cable. But since i HATE the Mscdex.exe configurations so much (so damn confusing!), i used the Asus CDRom drive installation program, and this driver seem to work on any kind of cdrom drive.

So yeah...i was able to set it up nicely with a SB AWE64 card, and the built-in video is actually better than the Cirrus Logic ISA video card i have here. Only thing is everytime i shut down this PC, i have to redo everything in the BIOS, but no big deal, i know what to do, except for the numbers for the HDD setup, i wrote them down on a paper, backed up what i need for this PC on 3.5" floppy disks, and backed up the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys just in case. Of course there's only DOS 6.22 on it, and some games...
 
RaptorZX3 said:
those computers are nearly impossible to find nowadays, the only way to find this is to stumble on it in a flea market or a goodwill, maybe once in your lifetime...

i was able to make a cdrom drive work on it, good thing it support Master and Slave with a 40pins 3-connectors IDE cable. But since i HATE the Mscdex.exe configurations so much (so damn confusing!), i used the Asus CDRom drive installation program, and this driver seem to work on any kind of cdrom drive.

So yeah...i was able to set it up nicely with a SB AWE64 card, and the built-in video is actually better than the Cirrus Logic ISA video card i have here. Only thing is everytime i shut down this PC, i have to redo everything in the BIOS, but no big deal, i know what to do, except for the numbers for the HDD setup, i wrote them down on a paper, backed up what i need for this PC on 3.5" floppy disks, and backed up the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys just in case. Of course there's only DOS 6.22 on it, and some games...
Click to expand...

Have you checked out the CMOS battery yet?
 
i have next-to-none skill in soldering, and no soldering iron, so...no, i didn't. But there must be a way to install a CR2032 battery socket for this board.
 
Any chance of updating the other thread with your cdrom solution and a link to the software you used. It may be usefull for others in a similar sitation. Good to see yo got it sorted. See if there are a row of pins with EXT BAT or similar. If there are you can just make up some flying lead and battery pack can be any number of battery type. There may be a correponding jumper to select between onboard and ext. batteries.
 
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i did updated the CDRom thread not long ago.

@Smeezekitty: yes it was leaking, but i used cutters to cut the 2 contacts and took it out, it doesn't save the BIOS settings anymore, but at least it won't damage the board anymore.
 
This board layout must've been a "standard" of sorts, because I was just going through my "it looks so broken I'm not even going to test it" pile and found a 1993 Digital 486 motherboard which looks damn near identical. So if anyone is looking for a replacement motherboard and isn't too fussed about manufacturer - might be worth poking your nose around a few of the 'slimeline' 486 desktops on ebay, might come across a match. (probably not helpful, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless)
 
As I understand it, there was a set of standards for low-profile PCs called "LPX" and "NLX" that saw a lot of usage in the mid-1990s. I don't know for sure if the 125 follows them, but I certainly remember seeing tons of brand-name PCs with the same long row of ports along the back and an ISA or ISA/PCI riser in the case. (A lot of them were also 286 or 386SX machines. It was to the point where my brother and I were biased against any machine with PS/2 ports, since it was almost certainly a 386SX. :p)

The 125 does support an external battery; the connector and the select jumper are near the on-board NiCd battery. If you want, you could also snip out the existing NiCd and solder in leads to a 3.6-volt NiMH pack (either one intended for a cordless phone, or just 3xAAA in a holder).
 
lee4hmz said:
As I understand it, there was a set of standards for low-profile PCs called "LPX" and "NLX" that saw a lot of usage in the mid-1990s. I don't know for sure if the 125 follows them, but I certainly remember seeing tons of brand-name PCs with the same long row of ports along the back and an ISA or ISA/PCI riser in the case. (A lot of them were also 286 or 386SX machines. It was to the point where my brother and I were biased against any machine with PS/2 ports, since it was almost certainly a 386SX. :p).
Click to expand...
Well that was certainly a one eyed point of view. I've a number of OEM systems from that era with PS/2 ports(Dec/ Compaq/Acer) and they're all 486 based boxes.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Well that was certainly a one eyed point of view. I've a number of OEM systems from that era with PS/2 ports(Dec/ Compaq/Acer) and they're all 486 based boxes.
Click to expand...

We tended to get a lot of people's castoffs, and so when people were upgrading to 486s, the 386SXs are what we ended up seeing. Most of the 486 machines we had later on were home-built machines with Baby AT motherboards, and so they had AT keyboards and (more often than not) serial mice. We didn't really start respecting PS/2 stuff until the Pentium era (when the machines had gotten better, and ATX was taking over from BAT).
 
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