Hard drive detection

Post by **corpse** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 8:28 am

My computers date and time change every reboot. I am guessing this means the cmos battary is dead or dying?

Also my hard drive does not always detect. When the computer boots up usally lately it shows not detected for primary master, slave etc.

But sometimes it deos detect it and windows loads. But then it usually reboots after a few minutes.

Could this all be casued by the battery or is the hard drive most likey dying as well??

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 8:39 am

You probably need a new power supply.
Check the voltage on the connectors.

Post by **DiscoDave** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 10:52 am

How long have you had the computer for?

IMHO the cmos battery lasts years and years and i've never had to replace one. Though it couldn't hurt replacing it.

Would also look into a faulty psu, What is it and what are your components?

Post by **Oeloe** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 1:53 pm

On some systems you can check the cmos battery voltage in the BIOS (hardware monitoring

Vbatt usually).

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 6:01 pm

Yeah, you probably need a new cmos battery also. But those should last like 5 years or so.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 8:11 am

Well if your computer is disconnected from power frequently, like mine is every night so I do have the LEDs from the computer or speakers glaring at me, then the CMOS battery will die fairly quickly. In my case it just died one day, started up and got CMOS checksum error, so I just loaded a saved BIOS, nice feature that ABit boards have, and did that till I got a new battery. As long as power was being fed into the mobo via the power supply there was no problem. Don't know if that story can help you troubleshoot, but you never know. I agree with FragaGeddon, you should replace the CMOS battery, no big deal, you can find the battery at Wal-Mart, most likely a CR2032.

Post by **corpse** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 8:32 am

The battery was dead and the hard drive dying. Thnaks

Post by **raw** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 10:23 am

I was thinking more along the lines of bad motherboard. Everyone is right, those are lithium batteries which are designed to last years. I was in the electronic repair field for a few years and the only time those 3v lithium batteries went dead is when a component on a board wasn't functioning properly and ended up putting extra load (resistance) on the battery circuit. Some of battery failures were from water damage (corrosion), bad resistors, capacitors, etc.., and faulty IC Chips.

The fact that your battery is dead and your hard drive died could easily be caused by a bad motherboard. All it would take is 12v running on a 5v like due to a blown chip, or other component and it will fry all circuits attached to that one line (Including hard drives).