cmos battery

[debiani386 at gmail.com]

On Fri June 15 2007 6:01 pm, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Adric Mitchell wrote:
> > The CMOS battery is just a small watch battery on the motherboard.
> > I've never had to change one (it's somewhat rare when you do), but
> > just buying a replacement battery and popping it in should fix it.
>

> > On Jun 15, 2007, at 10:46 AM, norman wrote:
> >> The other day, when booting up I pressed 'Esc' in order to select a
> >> particular version of the kernel. To be certain I pressed the key
> >> several times and, eventually, got a message telling me that there had
> >> been a cmos battery failure and to press 'enter' to continue. Booting
> >> restarted and I was able to select the kernel I wanted. I now get this
> >> message every time I boot.
> >>
> >> Does this message mean anything disastrous, what adverse effects do I
> >> need to look out for and is there any way I can check to see if the
> >> message is valid? Please advise.
>

If you get this message every time you reboot, check the following things:
1) Check that the CMOS battery is seated properly in its socket
2) If the battery is seated properly, you will need to get a new battery

Usually, cmos batteries are watch batteries, but not on all systems. My Compaq 
lte elite laptop uses a small Ni-Cad battery as a cmos battery and its not a 
watch battery

Replacing the battery is easy, just take out the battery, bring it to any 
electronics store with you and find the battery that is the correct size.

When you insert the new battery, all your previous BIOS settings will be gone 
(which they are already, since you are having a cmos failure). You may have 
to reconfigure your bios if you changed it from the manufacturer default 
settings

HTH

--cj