560Z halts after POST, no F1 BIOS access

[Chris Thorne]

I have a 560Z which was operating happily up until the other day. The CMOS battery had conked out, and I got what I immediately recognized as battery error codes on boot, and was dumped to a time-set screen in the BIOS.

I had a good battery on hand from another machine, so I opened the failed system today. Which I should not have done! I had forgotten that the Z has a battery door on the bottom. I ended up removing the keyboard and fussing around inside for ten minutes trying to find the dead batt. Finally figured it out and swapped batts.

On reassembly and restart, I got the expected battery error codes, and was dumped to the time-set screen. Set the time, restarted, and... huh?

No battery error this time. No error of any kind. Just a failure to proceed. I see the memory check total get displayed, and the IBM splash logo, and the ThinkPad splash logo. There is a brief faint buzz from the speaker. Then the system just sits there, displaying the memory count and the two logoes, and does nothing further, even after a long wait.

Okay, I had better check the BIOS config. Restarted with F1.

Nope. Same thing as before. It won't admit me to EZ SETUP.

I tried a few dozen times and ways, and always the same result.

I did reconnect the keyboard cable, and the trackpoint on the keyboard was working when I set the time after swapping batteries, so I don't think that is the issue.

Baffling. Any pointers? Thanks!

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