boot question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Hollywood
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Mike Hollywood

Will a computer boot if the cmos battery is dead?
or the other way round,
Can a dead cmos battery stop a computer from booting?
 
Mike Hollywood said:
Will a computer boot if the cmos battery is dead?
or the other way round,
Can a dead cmos battery stop a computer from booting?
Click to expand...
If the battery it totally dead then the computer should boot, but I have had
multiple motherboards with weak, dying, or shorted batteries in them that
caused corrupted CMOS every time the boards were booted.

After removal of the suspect batteries and either by using the CMOS reset
jumper or manually shutting down the power supplies for a couple of minutes
the boards were reset. After installing new batteries the boards were put
back into service.
 
Mike said:
Will a computer boot if the cmos battery is dead?
or the other way round,
Can a dead cmos battery stop a computer from booting?
Click to expand...

Packard Bell used to have some models that would refuse to boot if the
CMOS battery was not good. A somewhat weak one might boot until it
reached a certain point, but below that point the MB acted as if it were
dead.

Ken
 
Will a computer boot if the cmos battery is dead?
or the other way round,
Can a dead cmos battery stop a computer from booting?
Click to expand...
Yes it will, although it will probably be only from the floppy unless
the hard drive settings default to autodetect in BIOS.
 
The reason I asked the question was a friend brougt over a box that wouldn't
boot.
I measered the voltages and all were within specs. The keyboard flashed
when
you turned it on, but no post. You know how you pull this out and that out
until
you have a basic system? I did that, reseated everything etc., and
concluded the
mobo or CPU had failed, and I don't know how to test either. She took the
computer back to the owner and gave him my diagnoses.

Thinking about it later, I remembered I didn't test the cmos battery, and
wondered
if that could cause it not to boot. It's like it hangs after about 2
seconds of being on;
power supply fan is spinning, votages are applied, one red light on the mobo
is
glowing, but that's it. It's a 4 year old Dell Dimension.

Mike
 
the machine will go into the cmos with a dead battery most of the time
and request resetting it. If it booted into the cmos then the problems are
else where
 
Nope, it wouldn't boot into the CMOS. It didn't got
that far in the boot sequence.
 
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