Alright guys, need some help from some of you big brains out there! 
Here's the situation: Friend's old 486 (yeah, there's still a few kickin) freezes up, turns off machine manually - when turned back on receives 'CMOS: Checksum error' and the regular dooda about hitting F1/del to go into BIOS, blah, blah, blah.
So of course I figure that the CMOS battery is dying and it's probably accounting for the non-posting. I change the battery w/ a fresh one - same problem. This thing is beeping like a car in traffic now. It's making it through the memory check, so i'm not suspecting that. For the life of me, I can't find the CMOS clear/reset jumper on this old board either, so this is not helping my situation. So now i'm thinking okay, perhaps the ps is doing something funky, i've seen my fair share of similair problems w/older 486 systems - and also all the lights (including HD light) are constantly on - looks like a christmas tree. So I change the HD thinking perhaps it is corrupted, same problem - will post for a second then hang. So finally, I go into the CMOS/BIOS and start checking settings.
I see that the "Primary Master LBA Mode" setting is disabled....something smells fishy, I turn it back on/enable it. Turn on the machine and 'PRESTO!!' Everything is back to normal, run scandisk and find no errors.
So my question to you all is I don't ever recall a situation where the BIOS can randomly change it's settings all by itself - how can this happen? Maybe the OS was writing to the HD as she was turning it off? I don't know - can somebody enlighten me? Thanks so much.
-VTrider
Here's the situation: Friend's old 486 (yeah, there's still a few kickin) freezes up, turns off machine manually - when turned back on receives 'CMOS: Checksum error' and the regular dooda about hitting F1/del to go into BIOS, blah, blah, blah.
So of course I figure that the CMOS battery is dying and it's probably accounting for the non-posting. I change the battery w/ a fresh one - same problem. This thing is beeping like a car in traffic now. It's making it through the memory check, so i'm not suspecting that. For the life of me, I can't find the CMOS clear/reset jumper on this old board either, so this is not helping my situation. So now i'm thinking okay, perhaps the ps is doing something funky, i've seen my fair share of similair problems w/older 486 systems - and also all the lights (including HD light) are constantly on - looks like a christmas tree. So I change the HD thinking perhaps it is corrupted, same problem - will post for a second then hang. So finally, I go into the CMOS/BIOS and start checking settings.
I see that the "Primary Master LBA Mode" setting is disabled....something smells fishy, I turn it back on/enable it. Turn on the machine and 'PRESTO!!' Everything is back to normal, run scandisk and find no errors.
So my question to you all is I don't ever recall a situation where the BIOS can randomly change it's settings all by itself - how can this happen? Maybe the OS was writing to the HD as she was turning it off? I don't know - can somebody enlighten me? Thanks so much.
-VTrider
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