Moving forward in time a few years – I also had an old 386SX motherboard that would not turn on. Sure enough one of the traces was damaged by the battery leaking. It seems like 70-80% of the 386 era motherboards have now failed because of this exact problem. So many of them used a Varta NiCd battery that eventually leaks, and the leak almost always eats traces.

Fortunately there was only one trace that was damaged bad enough to need a patch. I soldered in a patch and the board POSTs. A quick bath in the ultrasonic to clean up some corrosion as well. 8MBs of RAM in this one, so it would have been a nice machine back in 1989. I had a 386SX machine during part of college, so good memories with this.

I’ll have to look around and see if I have a 387SX in my parts bins.