My PC won't boot into BIOS, is the CMOS battery dead?

[Arkitech]

Anyone experience this before?

 

[theevilsharpie]

If you CMOS battery dies, you BIOS won't keep settings between power cycles, but I've never heard of a dead CMOS battery locking you out of the BIOS completely.

What exactly is happening?

 

[Arkitech]

After I turn the power on I get the text of the bios getting ready to load and then it freezes. In the past I noticed something similar like this would happen if I had certain USB devices plugged in, but usually unplugging them resolved the stalled booting issue. Not sure why I can't boot this time?

 

[JackMDS]

It can happen, I had last week a Dell that did the exact same.

A trip to RS and a new Battery solved the problem.

 

[KGB]

I had this happen not too long ago.
I thought the CMOS battery was going bad but when I measured it, it was okay.
It turned out the battery holder on the MB had a small crack in the plastic and the battery wouldn't make proper contact. A trip to Rat Shack, $0.99 for new holder and 5 minutes with a soldering iron later, WIN!

 

[Arkitech]

I finally got around to replacing the battery, but that did'nt seem to work so I'm back to square one. I'll take a closer look at the battery housing to see if there are any cracks. Not sure where to go from there, replace the mobo maybe?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Check with 1 stick of memory and do a CMOS reset. It could be doing it's memory testing and one stick is giving the system a hiccup.

 

[Arkitech]

This is really wierd, I tried swapping out the memory but that did'nt seem to work. In fact the system does'nt even get to the point of doing the memory check. It's like the system just locks on the BIOS page, I can see the options to enter into BIOS or the boot order screen but the system does'nt respond to the keystrokes. (probably because the keyboard appears to lockup at that point, its unresponsive) I ended up taking out my video card, wireless nic card and sound card but that does'nt seem to make a difference either. The CMOS battery appears to be installed correctly, I did'nt notice any cracks or loose connections on the housing.

I tried reseating all of the wires and other connections on the mobo. Any ideas on what I should try next? New mobo perhaps?

 

[Arkitech]

I think the mobo is shot, I'm gonna swap it out. I currently have a AMD 3500+ cpu, can I get a decent replacement mobo for 30 bucks or less? I just use the PC for watching movies (HD) so I don't need anything with a lot of features or bells and whistles.

 

[cmdrdredd]

unplug your USB keyboard and plug it into the PS/2 port via one of those adapters or use an old PS/2 keyboard if you have one. My Motherboard locks up from USB keyboards.

 

[sinka_bogdan]

I have kinda different problem. I tried to change the memory command rate from T2 to T1... but this froze up my bios when i restarted the pc. I cleared the cmos to solve this... but now i have a different problem... after clearing I'm asked if i want to continue with setup defaults (F1) the pc runs no problem at all. if i shut down or restart my pc i have to clear the cmos every time else it won't boot at all (even the bios screen won't appear and the buzzer bip is nowhere to be heard). conclusion... everytime after (cmos reset) i lose power to pc or restart it, it doesn't boot at all. Anyone heard of such a thing ?




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Asus M2N32-sli deluxe
Amd athlon x2 4400+ g1 stepping
4x1gb kingmax ddr2 800
2x asus 8800gt sli
wd 160 sata
wd 80 ata
corsair tx850w
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