I guess the question is do you need to retrieve the data? If not, then pull the drives and destroy them. There are companies that will shred drives – and there are a variety of other ways to erase the data. I work for the US Department of Justice – we have specific proceedures to follow when “excessing” computer hardware – which includes sanitizing the drives – unfortunately, we have no specific written proceedures for AS/400 drives. (All the proceedures we have are written around Windoze)

If you need to retrieve the data you may need to pay someone – or you can do as Yorkshireman suggests and just plug it in and wait a bit – OR – get inventive. Disconnect the batteries – mark the cables and battery terminals first so you know how to reconnect it all. Get a car battery charger and charge the suckers up. Carefully connect it all and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything but some time.

Good luck.
regards
Mike

If we cannot find a way to jump-start the batteries

we will have to destroy the disk drives. We are a state agency and there is also laws about what we do with all equipment so it will most likely go to another state agency or at least they get the first option to grab it. It will certainly be less useful w/o the disk drives but we may have to do that.

to reiterate –
1) Connect to power – go have a 3 course lunch
2) return hours later, press ‘power on’
3) Await results via a connected console

If it’s scrap and not on maintenance, do you care? If ‘management’ don’t want trheir data go walkabout in the world from the scrapyard then they’ll have to pay IBM to come and fix it.

BUT
If this is a potential for you to take home and nurture, then it’s important – we need to find a solution.

If it is really really old, best examine it internally for battery degradation.

- make friends with an engineer –

and start reading the manuals – the engineering manuals may be on line somewhere in the ibm.com site.