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I got this machine through Marktplaats, a Dutch consumer auction and secondhand items site. Many thanks to Nico for the careful packaging and the inclusion of everything needed!
The machine is a beautiful rugged “lugtop” from around 1990.
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The machine was originally a Network General Sniffer. These were immensely expensive machines at the time, containing different kinds of hardware to allow “sniffing” on different communication networks. Mine came with a 3com FDDI card (3c996-SX), a 3com 1GB ethernet card (3c996-T) and a WAN card (a Network General L2000).
The machine came with two keyboards. The one attached to the machine was damaged; the left control key was missing a cap, and the switch under it was broken. The second keyboard was fine but had a connector that was too wide; it would not fit inside the Dolch. This was easily fixed by cutting it off and replacing it with a new RJ9 P4C4 connector.
The machine would not boot; its CMOS battery was dead so it could not retain any settings.
Links:
Specs
Bios | Award bios version V4.51PG |
Processor | Pentium 1 (P54) |
Motherboard | AI5TV |
First round…
Fixing the battery
This machine came with a dead battery, and it causes boot failures.
The battery is embedded in a “chip” like thing that contains a real-time clock, memory and the battery, all helpfully enclosed in an epoxy layer - so the battery cannot be replaced. The type of the thing is Odin oec12c887a. A replacement for this, the Dallas ds12C887A is still available but sourcing a new one is hard.
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I attempted to repair the module by adding an external battery as found out by other courageous people. Links:
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And with that the machine can boot again and could remember its settings 
Storage
The machine was altered, it came with 2 harddisks and a CD reader. The extra harddisk was lodged between the CD drive and the other drive and not fixed with screws. One disk seems to contain contains Windows 2000, the other Windows 98. Both disks have problems and give errors, but you can get the OSes to boot, sometimes partially. The Windows 2000 disk contains the Sniffer software.
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Both harddisks were unreliable: after fixing the battery the machine would randombly randomly boot from one or the other depending on whether the disk came “alive” at powerup. The boot itself would fail often because of disk errors. Next step is to recover the disk contents, if at all possible…
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Make sure to wait for the process to finish and eject the disk from the OS before removing/switching off the converter.
Many thanks to this article on how to use ddrescue.
Making the Dolch boot from the new device
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Once saved replace the disk with the SDcard thing again. It should now boot.
Keyboard repair
Next was the damaged keyboard. I ordered some replacement switches (Cherry MX Blue) and replaced the damaged switch:
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I did of course not have the original keycap so I reused one from an old set of PC keycaps.
Round 2
When I started to put everything back into the housing after a week I found out that the machine would not boot- of course after everything got in..
The clock and CMOS was also reset. Checking the battery showed it to be completely flat. Clearly something uses a lot of power.
After replacing the battery I also found out that something is wrong with the IDE controller or the cable; it reports a disk failure 😢 - more to investigate..
There are more problems than just the IDE.. The floppy interface also does not work. Which is bad because we’ll need that to install anything.
I will investigate, but I will also be on the lookout for a new motherboard.
Motherboard replacement
The AI5TV motherboard is a “Baby AT” form factor board. Other boards that have that form factor and which might fit are:
In the end I opted for Soyo SY-5BT5 2.x:
This fits rather nicely.