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Building a replacement 386/486 CMOS battery
If your motherboard has an external battery header, they’re easy to build and work great.
Motherboards made from the late-1990s to today generally have a CR2032 cell to maintain the system realtime clock and CMOS settings when the machine isn’t operating. But you’ll quickly want to replace it to save yourself reconfiguring the BIOS every time you power up the machine, especially if you’re using an older board without XT-IDE autoconfiguring your cylinders, heads, and sectors for you. Armed with a good pair of pliars, I was able to feed the exposed leads of the battery holder into the crimpable header, and crimp them down until they were tight.
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