So I rescued an Epson Equity IIe from a school scrap bin, and it's looking like the bios information is stored on a hard drive.
The catch 22 is there wasn't a hard drive installed, so when I run the setup program, it doesn't recognize the one I put in.

Anyone have a solution?

Is it possible to select the "AUTO" option in Setup (that is, to select the option to automatically detect your hard drive upon boot up)? If not, then I would say that it doesn't have support for automatically detecting hard drives, meaning that you will have to write down the information from the hard drive label and enter in the information manually.

Also, if you have the proper information regarding these systems, it might be possible to install the hard drive in another system (one of which doesn't store the BIOS Setup information on the hard disk itself), create a file (or copy such a file to the hard disk) that contains the proper Setup configuration information, and then reinstall it in the other system, to see if that works.

Finally, I'll try searching for information relating to the Epson Equity systems online, to see if that could also help you here.

After some snooping around, the CMOS battery is dead. Also, it's soldered into the motherboard. Grrr! What am I supposed to do?

I'd start off trying to find a motherboard reference - a lot of older PC motherboards had a soldered in CMOS battery, but they also had a set of jumper pins to connect an external battery. If there isn't one on the board, you could try desoldering the battery and soldering a battery holder in its place.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/supp ... ?oid=14218 << manuals / faq's