One of the computers at work recently took a crap on us. When it boots up, it goes to the screen where you choose either last known config, start up normaly, or safe mode. No matter what you choose after the windows boots up it goes to a blue screen and says physical memory dump for 1 sec, then it restarts. When I went to bios setup and checked the events log, it said CMOS battery failure. Does this have anything to do whith this? And what is the CMOS Battery?
dieing comp?
- Thread starter Spigitty
- Start date
That is the Litium battery on the main board itself. The most common is the CR2032 battery found where calculators and watches are sold like the jewelry section in a Walmart or other retail outlet. Gee? At least you were told what the problem is there. When one case wouldn't do anything when the power button was pushed one morning... finally a new battery on the year old build saw life again.
i don't see how the cmos battery would kill the os. with it dead, the cmos would use the factory default settings at boot up.
now...if a stick of ram went bad, then it could resault in corrupted os files which would resault in the os going bad. the hard drive would be fine though, you could toss it in the new pc as a slave to get the info you want off it.
now...if a stick of ram went bad, then it could resault in corrupted os files which would resault in the os going bad. the hard drive would be fine though, you could toss it in the new pc as a slave to get the info you want off it.
The only time bad ram will effect data and the OS directly is during a process of copying or processing data directly. The glitch in the running program corrupts or losses data directly at that time. To replace the battery is easy enough by carefully loosening the retainer on the holder itself. It simply will popup out of that.
Refer to the user manual for the system or board to see how to jumper the cmos pins back and forth once the battery is out for clearing the cmos. Remember to return the small plastic cap moved from pins #1+#2 to #2+#3 back to #1+#2 in the first minute. The two pins you find the jumper are set to the default position. You move the jumper over and then back after several seconds to clear the non voilitile ram.
Once the cmos is cleared the bios settings are returned to the original factory defaults. If any settings were changed from those by the person who originally setup and services have that person make the needed changes again. Frequent backups are a concern for everyone actually. When a battery goes it doesn't trash the OS or files on the drive. Simply replacing the battery should see everything back to normal unless something else went.
Refer to the user manual for the system or board to see how to jumper the cmos pins back and forth once the battery is out for clearing the cmos. Remember to return the small plastic cap moved from pins #1+#2 to #2+#3 back to #1+#2 in the first minute. The two pins you find the jumper are set to the default position. You move the jumper over and then back after several seconds to clear the non voilitile ram.
Once the cmos is cleared the bios settings are returned to the original factory defaults. If any settings were changed from those by the person who originally setup and services have that person make the needed changes again. Frequent backups are a concern for everyone actually. When a battery goes it doesn't trash the OS or files on the drive. Simply replacing the battery should see everything back to normal unless something else went.
Besides slaving the drive(s) ide that is the recovery or full installation disk could also be used for try at performing a repair install on Windows. Besides the obvious need for a replacement battery if Windows needed repair the article at the link here gives a detailed explaination on how to repair Windows itself and still preserve most of the programs installed as well not deleting any folders. Video and sound drivers(if any for sound) may have to reinstalled however. http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm