Think my CMOS battery dead. What about BIOS settings?

[xenon]

HI.
Firstly if this has already been discussed elsewhere I apologise. I couldn't read the. "Read this first thread" because there's too much swearing and the proxy at work blocks it.

ight Right here's what's up. I switch computer on, it can't find the hard drive and tries to scan the floppy drive for a bootable disk. My suspicion is the CMOS battery is dead as prier to this problem, the PC would not boot after being initially powered on. I had to turn it off and then back on for it to boot. This computer is 3 years old and I've always had the mains plug switched off when I power down, not realising the battery was rechargible. .

If I get a new battery and change it, I assume the BIOS will have gone back to default settings. Will this be a major problem when and if I get booted back into Windows? How can I know what the correct BIOS settings are if they've all been set back to default by the dead battery?

And finally.

If the battery is the issue and I replace it, touch wood, everything works again. Should I leave the mains plug for the computer switched on, so it lasts longer?

Thanks people.

 

[mauvais]

It isn't rechargeable, it's like a big watch battery.

Is the BIOS forgetting the time and date? If not, you have a different problem.

 

[xenon]

When it was last working the time was alright. My other idea was that maybe the hard drive is dead. but to be honest I'd rather buy a battery for a fiver and try that out before worrying about a new drive.

I'll have to write later in the week because I'm not gonna get a chance to have a propper look at this machine until then. Just taking the oppotunity of internet access at work to get some ideas.

Cheers.

 

[mauvais]

Just check the connections. My battery's lasted over 5 years, so I doubt it's that. It's unusual for a hard drive to die such that it disappears off the radar completely; if it's not showing in the BIOS bootup then maybe something else is wrong; settings, cables, power etc.

 

[xenon]

Yep I checked inside the computer last night and all drives, ATA cables and power were secure. Can a loss of BIOS settings due to the battery going though, mean it can't find the hard drive to boot from? Because it seems to go for the floppy drive and is looking for something there.

Sorry just one other thing. If I remove theHD with the OS on, which also has a load of files I need. put it into a USB caddy. Will I be able to browse and copy files from it, assuming it's not totally corrupt or failed?

 

[mauvais]

Only if it had to be manually configured, which for a 3 year old [recent] computer is very unlikely, if not impossible. Otherwise both your settings and the defaults will be based on automatic searching for drives; i.e. it'll work from scratch.

You can usually boot off a USB device - look in the BIOS for boot priorities; it can be hit and miss whether it'll work straight away in a USB caddy, but it should be OK.

Edit: you haven't fitted any other drives, or potentially changed/lost the slave/master jumper settings on any of them have you? Could explain it.

 

[xenon]

Thanks mauvais. I'll give these a go when I get the chance later and report my findings as it were.

 

[Klaatu]

CMOS battery dead--restoring settings

If a dead CMOS battery is indeed your problem, and though it's probably too late for you to implement this solution now, I've long been using a set of excellent (and utterly free) utilities
to periodically save my CMOS settings to a FILE on a removable floppy disk (it should be obvious why you shouldn't save these files to your hard drive!) just for this eventuality. Basically, were this to happen to me, I'd just replace the battery, boot the machine up (even the "DOS mode" is fine), pop in the floppy (which contains the CMOS Save/Restore utilities and the latest copy of my CMOS settings) and run CMOSREST (CMOS Restore) to get my old settings back instantly. Then re-boot. Works like a charm, and as I said, the three utilities (CMOS Save, CMOS Restore, CMOS Check--which compares your current CMOS settings to a saved copy) and the saved copy of your CMOS data will easily fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk. Obviously, you must at least have the CMOSRest (CMOS Restore) program on the same removable disk. If you've got a newer system that doesn't have a floppy, put everything on a CD. I just love those "mini-CDs" that are 3.5" in diameter and hold 180MB!

BTW, this problem (lost CMOS settings due to a dead battery) has never (well, not in 20+ years, at least) happened to me--I usually upgrade my mobo long before the mobo battery goes dead--but the very idea of the inconvenience this would cause attracted me to these utility programs. The CMOS memory draws so little current (microamps, usually) that the batteries generally last for years. Depending on how often I do "incremental" upgrades (adding hard drives, e.g.), I usually run CMOSSave perhaps every six months or so, just to be on the safe side.

 

[xenon]

Well FWIW, I took it into a repair place. It's there now. I actually suspect the PSU is too low powered300W. Anyway the tech bloke tells me themobo has fried some capaciters.

He's fitting a new one and a 400W PSU. Wishful thinking a 5 quid battery could have fixed it all.

Will get it back in a short while hopefully.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

He's talking rubbish, if the PSU was too small then it would never have worked at all. What may well have happened is that the PSU was an antec (or worse) and degraded over time so that instead of being a 300W PSU it functioned as a 150W one. Almost any high end gaming machine (without SLI or crossfire can be run happily on 350W), a three year old machine won't get near that.

Fried caps on the motherboard either means the PSU went and took the motherboard out with it, or the motherboard was defective in the first place and the PSU is fine.

 

[xenon]

Well I'm using this box mainly as an audio work station. Bog standard graphics card but extra hard drive soundcard and MIDI po. I'm getting the repair guy to put in a 400W PSU in case I add any more drives to it. The 300W PSU it came with was a Soltech.

That was my guess work from reading a couple of forums. When i asked the repair guy why the mobo might die like that, he just said old age. 3 and a half years old it is. I used to leave it on for a couple of days at a time. Sounds a bit premature though.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Never heard of soltech so it could be a cheap POS one, or it could be that i don't know the names of all the good PSU builders.

If it had bad caps then that would explain it (there's a whole site devoted to the topic, badcaps.com i think). In short there are a load of computers with substandard capacitors that tend to leak, and then blow up far sooner than they should do.

 

[xenon]

The bloke's just got back to me. Fixed now. He stuck another mother board with intel chipset in. All seems to work although I have to reinstall the soundcard.All other drivers are loaded up and working apparently.

Not sure about Soltech's rep. Actually thinking about it may be Suntek from memory. The case is anyway. Nicesound damping acrilic type thing..

FWIW tis one of
these