Help Needed; BIOS

[A3ther]

I recently acquired the parts to piece together a fairly old system. It took me a few hours today to clean the parts up and piece everything together, but I finally got the damned thing to boot up.

Question is, how do I enter into the BIOS of this machine ?
It is a true 386 / 80486, it has just over 15MB of 30 pin RAM. When I boot it up, it says AMI BIOS 1993 American Megatrends: Resident Diagnostics V1.11. I have also been able to find the BIOS update date as 12/15/93.

The obvious keys don't work, I have already tired F1-12, [tab], [delete], et cetera.

It boots into a stripped SCO Unix; stops at the [boot:] prompt.

It does not boot off of floppy or cd-rom drive first, if it even supports either.

Any help at all will be greatly appreciated; might not only be BIOS, any other advice on what to do will also be appreciated.

[cheyenne1212]

From what I've found, it looks like the key should be delete.

Try esc. If that doesn't work, just punch every key on the keyboard. That usually works

[maverick202]

For older BIOS "Delete" should work...repeatedly press Delete

The thing is there should be some key... and the possibility of a combination key(eg shift+..) is less probable..so try different keys

maverick

[A3ther]

Already tried. . .

Any other ideas?

The key board works fine too, I tried to get SCO to do anything but stopped after I realized it's worthless, or maybe I am worthless at using it, one of those.

[gunit0072003]

A3ther

Try disconnecting the harddrive/IDE cable then reboot. This sometimes forces the PC to prompt
the setup mode/BIOS. It has worked for me in the past,,,(cant explain it.murphy's law)

Good luck,,,

[cheyenne1212]

The only thing I'm thinking of, is paying $50 for a cheap, but new M/B to stick in there.

Try laying your whole arm across the keyboard. You have to keep trying.

Just out of curiosity here, but it doesnt' say anything like "press DEL to enter BIOS" or press F10 to enter setup.??

[A3ther]

Nope, only says what I stated before.
Have tried pressing every key one at a time, and also punching key board, neither work.

Disconnecting the hard drive, removing proc, removing memory, don't get me to BIOS.

The computer is not worth a new board, even a $50 one. But I still want to get it working, seems too much of a waste to toss or scrap it.

[cheyana]

long shot here for the floppy boot part.. if there is a battery on the board perhaps removing it and forcing the BIOS back to default state may set default boot device to floppy

[Nightfalls_Girl]

try F8

or try Esc

or try using a hammer

Nightfalls_Girl

[A3ther]

Default boot device isn't floppy. Not even sure if it supports 3.5" floppy. (even after removing battery / resetting BIOS)

I have already tried every [F] key, I have already tried [Esc]. I have already tried tapping every key slowly, quickly, and in between.