Re: Z-RAM ultra 2... replacing the battery?

["Jayson Smith" <nospamratguyspambegone@nospamplease.bellsouth.ihatespam.net>]

Hi,
I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about here as I've never used one
of these cards but here's a thought:
When you did your quick power cycle, it's possible you had the machine
powered down just long enough to corrupt some of the data on the clock
board, but not long enough to totally destroy said data.  That would explain
why the year was still 04.  One thing you might try is a longer power cycle
and see if it reverts back to the time it had originally E.G. before you ran
the setting program.

"Gary" <dontyouspamme_vengefultacos@comcast.nospam.net> wrote in message
news:X0RWc.227473$eM2.144836@attbi_s51...
>
>  Wayne Stewart wrote:
> >
> >>I'd think that if it wouldn't work after a few hours, more time isn't
> >>likely to help. Having a rechargable battery, you'd think that the
> >>charging circuit would power the clock even with a dead battery. If
> >>you can, it'd be nice to check the voltage at the battery leads when
> >>the IIc is running in case it's the charging circuit that's not
> >>working
>
> Checking the leads on the battery would be problematic when running, since
> the card sits face up in the //c, and has to be socked down, since it
> connects into the MMU and CPU sockets on the motherboard.
>
>  Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> > That's right.  The circuit operates from the battery _only_ when
> > the computer power is off.
> >
> > That means that the software is choking because the clock
> > currently contains an invalid date/time.  Try running the clock
> > setting software and see if that fixes it for a warm boot (since
> > the battery is still not known to be working).
>
> I had booted up the clock setting disk before, and the setting software
> crashed into the monitor, too. Just now, I realized that there was the off
> chance that the setup disk would actually run the clock driver before it
> ran the setup program... (which, it turns out, it does... sorta stupid
> design there) so I booted up from another disk, then ran the clock setting
> software directly. And it worked! The clock had a date somewhere in the
> year 52. I reset it to the current date and time, then did a warm boot.
>
> The clock reading software was able to run without crashing, but it read
> back the exact date and time I had set with the clock setting program.
> After about 20 minutes, rebooting into any of the disks that has the clock
> driver still resulted in the exact time I had set being read. So it looks
> like the clock accepted the data, but won't actually update it.
>
> Next I tried a quick powercycle to see what would happen. Loading the
clock
> driver results in the crash to the monitor again. Running the clock setup
> software also ends up in a crash to the monitor, with the time on the
> screen showing a date in 04, but a different month and random time. Just
> before the crash, the time flips around madly, as if the software is
> reading from a spinning clock.
>
> So... I'd guess I'm looking at both a dead battery and a screwy clock
chip?
> A bit of googling turned up a PDF version of the Z-RAM's manual
> (http://tinyurl.com/6xn6l), which identifies the clock chip as an OKI
> 6242B. The spec sheet I found:
>
> http://www.okisemi.com/jp/datadocs/doc-eng/msm6242b.pdf
>
> says it has an onboard crystal... so I wouldn't be anle to swap out a
> crystal to see if that's the culprit. I'm not able to discern many other
> relevant details from the sheet (it's been almost 20 years since I flunked
> my last EE class ;-). The datasheet is dated 2002, so I assume the part is
> still made... perhaps I could just buy another one and swap out the
> existing chip (I think everything on the board was socketed, so I wouldn't
> have to tax my limited soldering skills).
>
> Thanks for all the help and suggestions so far!
>
> Gary
>
>
>
>