IT BS thread

How do you reset the bios without it on? Is there a reset button somewhere? And no it won't boot period

 

http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/960231-resetting-cmos.html

Might help. Post #5 is interesting too.

 

You can interrupt the boot process. F10 or F2 are pretty common keys used to do that. Could be different for your machine.

Also, before you try resetting the BIOS, make sure you haven't done anything in the BIOS that would prevent it from booting-disk encryption would be one example.

 

Alright. But there's no booting or anything like that. It's not even trying. But I'll read up on that last post and see if it'll help

 

Good luck with everything.

 

Thanks guys.

 

Most motherboards have (or, at least, USED to have) a hard reset jumper.

Look for a series of three metal pins somewhere near the CMOS battery. As an example, one of my 'spare' motherboards has normal operation as having pins 1 and 2 shorted. Meaning, there's a red plastic jumper connecting pins 1 and 2, while three is standing there nekkid.

To 'reset' the BIOS to stock, one would unplug the power (no, not just turn off. UNPLUG) and wait about 90 seconds. Move that plastic jumper from 1/2 to 2/3. Plug in power supply, hit the power button. Wait for 10 seconds of CPU fan spinning to pass.

Yank the power cord. Wait another 90 seconds. Move plastic jumper back to 1/2. Plug in power supply. Player would be good right about now, if you're partial to it.

Hit the power button. With luck, you're now at the BIOS your motherboard SHIPPED with.

Now, most all in one boards and consumer-based boards still have these, at least as of a couple years ago. Even now, new Asus/MSI/Intel/etc boards have them as well. This jumper set is generally near the watch-battery looking thing (CMOS battery), to make finding it easier. Some times, you'll need to remove hardware from an assembled case to find it...like its under cables, or behind a vodeo card.

That's a PITA, but the process is the same.

 

These may seem like dumb questions because I'm not really a computer guy but I'm still not getting how I can mess up it alter the bios when the computer was working fine when I used it two days ago when I shut her down. I'm not discounting anyone just trying to get all my thoughts together before I start dropping money and time

 

Without seeing it in person, it's hard to say what happened. Could be the bios, could be the mainboard died, or maybe the screen. The only time I've had a computer do what you're describing is because the computer wouldn't post with a particular USB stick plugged in.

 

No I totally hear you on that trust me. And I'd stick with google but so far y'all have been more helpful.

Oh and my hd kinda smells like tacos. I don't think I had tacos when I was puttin that one in haha

 

If it's been working in the past and nothing has been changed, it's more likely the CMOS battery is dead. A dead CMOS battery will act exactly as if you were eternally trying to reset the BIOS and exhibit exactly the conditions jpneely is talking about.
Keep in mind I've probably only seen one dead CMOS battery, and that was in the mid-90s on a school computer that was overused and should have been scrapped 10 years before I opened the case. I swear the school system is the inventor of the recycling movement.

 

So is the CMOS replaceable?

 

The CMOS battery is.

 

Do you need any special tools to do this?

 

Just a small screwdriver and some patience.

 

Well I think I'm good then. Thanks guys again. Would y'all go to any special place to get one? I'm assuming the batteries aren't universal

 

Are they just a watch battery? I was kinda expecting something more specialized

 

Most are available anyplace that sells watch or hearing aid batteries.

 

I wouldn't expect a dead cmos battery to prevent the system from starting up. It could error if the settings were wrong but you should see something on the screen if that were the problem. It's only purpose is to keep the bios settings stable if the system loses power (unplugged). Without the cmos battery, it would revert to the default bios settings whenever you unplugged the computer. I would suspect a bad motherboard or power supply unit. Back in the old days, before they had shorting pins to revert the bios to default, we used to take out the cmos battery to achieve the same result. A plugged in computer could do without a cmos battery altogether.

 

And back to the bad news haha