Managed to get the CMOS sorted with help of friend - thanks for all your help, however am now having a little problem which may or may not be associated with CMOS/Hard Disk?whatever:

Plugged in keyboard and did manual CMOS configuration - as you say a real PITA! Machine wanted me to enter HD settings for drive C. I entered (as given in my system board manual) Type 47 Cylinders 980 Heads 10 WPCom 65535 LZone 17 and it gave me size as 81MB automatically = OK so far however when I went into auto detect it changed these values to Type 47 Cyl 1654 Head 16 WPcom 65535 LZone 1654 and sectors 63 which suggested it was an 814MB Hard drive.

Accepted these changes, exited the CMOS setup and the machine boots apparently in a correct manner. Himem sys etc - all the expected comments on the screen. Then the EZRAK logo appears and it suggest I home the axis. Press + to do move and an error appears Axis Drive Fault or Axis Drive Off (looks like they alternate).

What I could do with knowing is does this suggest a software fault (in any way connected to the "different" hard drive settings it finds in auto configure or is the 486 PC likely to be working properly (after all it boots up) and I now have a fault on the X or Y axis amplifier boards?

I have checked the 20 amp fuses on each - OK and moved the connectors - nothing apparently disconnected.

My concern here is do we need to keep chasing a fault on the PC/486 Hard Disk configuration or is this likely to be something else?

Once again any help or direction would be most appreciated.