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New battery in motherboard; Fail-safe defaults necessary?

Muse

Muse

Lifer
I had evidence the CR2032 battery in my Gigabyte GA-K8n Pro motherboard (2003-4 vintage) was dieing (sometimes it wouldn't start automatically as set, and a couple days ago it actually forgot some settings), so I replaced it yesterday. Indeed the old 3v battery tests at .78v with my multimeter! New one measures 3.54v, before insertion.

I went into the BIOS and restored settings to pretty much what I thought they were and things seem OK now. But I picked up the manual afterwards and read about replacing the battery and it says after replacing the battery to go into the BIOS and restore to fail safe defaults. I had assumed that this would happen automatically after replacing the battery. Also, it said to wait 10 minutes before putting the new battery in, which I didn't quite do. Well, actually it did take me a couple minutes to get that thing in there.
 
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In some BIOSes, there are CMOS settings that are not user-accessable. They only get set when you select one of the defaults (failsafe or optimized), and if your CMOS went kablooie, you should definately select one of the defaults before you do anything else, to reset these "hidden" values.
 
VirtualLarry said:
In some BIOSes, there are CMOS settings that are not user-accessable. They only get set when you select one of the defaults (failsafe or optimized), and if your CMOS went kablooie, you should definately select one of the defaults before you do anything else, to reset these "hidden" values.
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It definitely went weird. The battery was dieing over a long period, probably a year, maybe more. It was almost completely dead at the end. I'll go to optimized defaults and reset what I want to. I'm having some difficulties with the system so I think it's best to not take any chances. I've got problems enough troubleshooting without hidden settings messing things up.
 
The 10 minutes is just to give the capacitors time to discharge, so that you don't have random values remaining in the BIOS. Restoring failsafes is really just redundancy to ensure that random values don't remain.

At least that is what it seems like to me.
 
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