Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Question about replacing DTS6 battery

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Posted by Rob J. Buskop (Member # 3338) on 10-30-2011, 03:45 PM:

I have an older DTS (2 drive) unit on my bench with one caddy drive that went to heaven and... a leaking back-up battery on
the motherboard. (No damage there)
Can I just desolder the affected battery and replace it with a
newer NiMh variety without losing the unit's set-up parameters?
Or would it be better to replace it carefully whilst the motherboard is switched on?
I'm a bit worried about losing the bios and whatever else
there's lurking in there and what would be vital to retain.
Would appreciate some advice here because computers are not my
area really.

Posted by Sean Weitzel (Member # 244) on 10-31-2011, 11:08 AM:

Meter the existing battery? is it already dead and the unit still boots? if so just desolder and put in a new one.

If you want to play it safe you can do what I used to do with old C-Band videocipher RS descrambling modules: Solder a new battery to the legs of the old one in parallel, then snip the bad one out just above the join when you are done.

Posted by Marco Giustini (Member # 4544) on 10-31-2011, 01:49 PM:

the easiest thing would be to write down the BIOS settings and then restore them - even though I think I remember that the settings were quite standard.

Posted by Rob J. Buskop (Member # 3338) on 11-04-2011, 03:31 PM:

Just to let you know how this ended:
As suggested, I checked the voltage of the old battery. It was dead. So I removed the bugger, cleaned the PCB where some leakage had occurred and installed a modern NiMh variety battery.
The DTS-6 booted normally hereafter.Like before....
Mission completed.
One question remains however: If this memory backup battery is apparently non essential to the operation of the device, why was it there in the first place....?

Posted by Sean Weitzel (Member # 244) on 11-04-2011, 03:42 PM:

I presume it's because the motherboard was a standard off the shelf 386 AT board. It would have cost more to have a special MB built for DTS omitting the clock battery than just to use what was already out there. The bios settings that the battery retains on a standard run of the mill MB would be system time and date (of course), hard drive settings (Cylinders, Heads, and sectors per track), and custom memory settings. Clearly DTS6 does not need any of these settings.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 11-04-2011, 03:53 PM:

6D units uses the 486/25 momboards and both ran 200W AT power supplies.

Put a video card in either unit's ISA slot and you can see what's going on.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 11-04-2011, 09:01 PM:

The original dts 6 were about 90% off-the-shelf from Frys. Louis

Posted by Rob J. Buskop (Member # 3338) on 11-05-2011, 07:50 AM:

Thank you guys for your much appreciated responses. It all makes sense and, for me, some knowledge has been gained!