Can CMOS battery cause boot problems

[kes101]

Hello again friends and thanks for looking my problem. I have just built a new Pentium4/3.0/ECS,FX648 mobo. Anyway after the initial build and test the machine was left for a week before being powered up again. Then i got a CPU has been changed message which i associated with a low CMOS battery. I press any button to continue but the machine fails to boot(just blank black screen). Once i changed the CMOS battery then the machine seems to boot OK. But although it looks like my problem is solved i just did not think a dead CMOS battery would stop a machine from booting(especially with me pressing the any button to continue once i got the CPU changed message). Any comments???????

 

[felixc]

Nowadays, an impressive amount of hardware configuration is held in the CMOS RAM. Unfortunately it includes clock and timings for the CPU chipsets in such a way that there is not anymore a "safe" power-on boot with the motherboards, as it used to be in the IBM days.

A badly configured CMOS Ram, because of a glitch, virus or bad battery, can prevent the whole system from giving any sign of life. Fortunately, a low battery is usually detected by the BIOS so that the "clear CMOS" jumper, or a battery removal, will cause the BIOS to load default values that will make the system boot.

In your case, it looks like the CMOS contents has been altered without causing the "low battery" flag to be raised.

 

[kes101]

Hi

WOW...You learn something every day. Thank you for your reply. The machine seems fine now with the new CMOS battery. Computers....who'd have em??????