Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Retsof on September 16, 2011, 12:23:04 pm
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Okay, I got my new machine last night, and after freaking out because the graphics card was't working, found that it simply wasn't plugged in all the way. Anyway, so now I have my monitor pligged in to the card, and everything works fine, but as it is booting up, where it lists whatever perepherals are in, it alwas has "CMOS Fail" at the bottom. Is this something I shoudl be worried about?
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Depending on the motherboard, there should be a small plastic cap, or a switch on the side of the board, that by removing allows you to clear the CMOS. In case you built it yourself or added the graphics card to it, that might fix it. As always, consult the motherboard's manual before you do anything. ;)
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Depending on the motherboard, there should be a small plastic cap, or a switch on the side of the board, that by removing allows you to clear the CMOS. In case you built it yourself or added the graphics card to it, that might fix it. As always, consult the motherboard's manual before you do anything. ;)
i prefer the old skool way of pulling the battery :D
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Note that the computer runs fine, i just want to know if this will cause problems in the future. i want to avoid playing with it's guts as much as possible.
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I am unsure if that is still the case but the BIOS was always stored on the CMOS, in theory your computer cant boot without it.
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perhaps the message really means cmos checksum fail
which would indicate the cmos has lost power at some time and has reset itself you should enter the bios and check all your settings
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On my newest build, I picked a Asus P8Z68-V board that had similar issues to this. Every so often on boot, the CMOS settings would show up on POST as bad or corrupt.
The system would also do this weird boot/shutdown/boot successfully thing when powering up. In my case, it turned out that the jumper that sets the keep/clear settings was missing. After putting a jumper on, it's been solid.
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I am unsure if that is still the case but the BIOS was always stored on the CMOS, in theory your computer cant boot without it.
the cmos is just volatile memory (though cmos is technically a type of semiconductor which can be made to do many different things, doesnt really describe what the chip really is, which i believe is an sram, ****ing misnomers), hence the battery, used to store settings for the bios, which (i think) is on an entirely different chip (likely an eeprom). you can boot without it but it will be like booting a mobo with factory settings every time. this isnt so much of a problem as it used to be, as most hardware tends to auto configure its self just fine. back in the old days when you needed to enter your hd parameters for them to work, and if you had a bad battery or cmos, you would have had to fiddle with the bois each time you booted. these days you might have issue with memory settings, but it usually defaults to a safe but lower performance setting. if your battery is dead (ive never had a mobo that lasted longer than its battery), you can order a dozen of them from china for a buck. if your cmos is bad, i bet you could get another chip off of ebay. why we dont store settings on something like flash or eeprom is beyond me. limited write cycles, yes, but how many times do you configure a bios? i think some mobos have such features though.
axe that, i decided id look it up.
there is an sram for bios settings but its usually integrated into the southbridge, along with the real time clock. sram is used for its low idle power consumption. the battery keeps the clock ticking and the ram in standby. the bios itself is stored on another chip (usually flash but eeproms may still be used, since they offer 10x more write cycles). so the chip by the battery is the rom and not the ram. of course this depends all on manufacturer preference.