Armada 4110 Hangs?
 

Hi,

This battered and valiant little machine has become something of a
personal project/challenge so bear with me.

Obviously stored for a very long time not connected to battery, with
no hard drive.

It has expansion base.

First thing in morning can install Win98 as far as 73% THEN it hangs.
As soon as it hangs it cannot be rebooted for some time, and you have
to pull the power cable to turn it off.

Reboots sooner without the hard drive.

Reboots sooner with 20v instead of 18v power.

Initially no fast charge light, now the light comes on but battery
does not charge.

Given maybe 30 minutes-1hour to cool off (or "rest up" or whatever the
heck it's doing)it will load Win98 58% now, but initially only 21%.

I have dismantled it and gone over it with a fine toothcomb. I stopped
it overheating with an old trick that used to fix a lot of continuous
absorption refrigerators...sat it upside down overnight!

I have replaced all the missing screws on the mainboard (3 or 4, some
"earth to chassis").

I have restored the MBR and run "fixboot" on every floppy that goes
near it (it was getting erratic about which floppied it would read)
that improved things.

It gets better ALL the time, but not enough...I don't think it can be
heat now because it is running so very cool.

I get the feeling that the power that SHOULD got to the handle battery
is draining to earth somewhere else?

Any ideas?

Praxis