Re: 600au: SRM setting doesn't stick?

Mouse,

The CMOS battery should be on the mainboard, but the mainboard is not 
the mainboard if that makes sense. The PCI and ISA slots are actually on 
a separate board from the CPU/RAM/CMOS battery. If you remove the 
clamshell portion of the case and look where the PS/2, parallel, etc 
ports are you should see two lift tabs on a case-length PCB, this will 
be where the battery lives. It'll come up and out easily, then you can 
just slot it back in. Sorry if I am being unclear, I have the same model 
but it is late here so words are a bit hard x)

Just in case, here's the service manual, 5-12 and onward is what you're 
looking for: 
https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/manual/b30wwsma-60841c95f009e303767433.pdf

On 12/6/23 12:26 AM, Mouse wrote:
> I recently dragged out an alpha from storage.  According to the case,
> it's a 600au.
>
> It came up in what I think is ARC - a bunch of X3.64 escape sequences,
> prompting for keystrokes like F2.  I found enough saved doc to use its
> menu system minimally, and got it set to SRM.  And, with a bit of work,
> I even got it to boot.  (The NetBSD/alpha I had on hand turned out to
> be rather old - 2003 vintage 1.4T.  Cool that NetBSD that old runs on a
> real 64bit machine!)
>
> The reason I'm writing now is that the SRM setting doesn't seem to
> stick.  If I turn it off for more than about 250ms, it reverts back to
> ARC.  (To be precise, my sample size is two: the two times I have
> turned it off after setting SRM and left it off for more than about
> 200-300 ms, it has reverted; I have used a fast power-cycle as a reset,
> since the reset button doesn't seem to work in many cases, and it's
> worked fine, but it has been a *fast* power-cycle, and the SRM setting
> has survived those.)
>
> Am I correct in thinking this just means it needs a battery
> replacement, a la CMOS battery on i386 or amd64?  If so, can anyone
> give me a pointer to where the battery hides?  It's a nicely made
> chassis, mechanically, but it doesn't look particularly easy to
> disassemble; I'd rather avoid taking it apart to the extent feasible.
> So knowing where to look for the battery would be useful.  (I did take
> a look inside it.  I didn't see anything that looked promising, but
> only about half the main PCB was visible.)
>
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