Does your BIOS keep resetting itself?
It could happen.
Let's talk to Wes at the bench and find out why.
Hey, Wes, I'm asking for a friend.
Sure, I've heard that one before. It really is.
Bios issues.
BIOS’s resetting themselves or not behaving properly.
What are some of the symptoms of a BIOS going rogue?
Well, I like how you put it.
You actually kind of said what some of the symptoms are.
So we've looked at BIOS in another episode
and how we can upgrade the firmware and stuff.
Well, that's the ROM chip that holds those instructions.
And one of the great things about that kind of storage
is the fact that when we don't have the power going,
guess what; all of the information that's in that ROM chip,
it's just fine.
Doesn't go anywhere. Nothing happens to it.
However, there is a non or a volatile region;
which just means, let’s understand,
a volatile storage region,
which means if we don't have power,
all of the settings are lost.
That's kind of how system memory works,
when you're working with your ram.
When you turn the computer off,
any data that was in ram, it's completely lost.
Well, we have a few settings that are stored
in this volatile region that BIOS actually references.
Like for instance, the system clock,
you might see the system date and time,
largely speaking, that is stored in ram.
So some of those custom configurations
that you do in your BIOS interface
are going to be stored in a volatile region.
Now, just like I said, well, what happens?
We don't have any power on this system right now,
so what's going on?
Well, what's going on when those settings
don't seem to be staying and they keep resetting themselves,
you go into your bio interface, you set them,
you turn the computer off, normal operation;
you're not doing anything any different.
And you boot back into the computer, and all of a sudden,
you see the system date and time is like a year ago.
Yeah, I was just going to say that my friend…
Yeah, okay, got you.
He powers on his computer, the home screen,
and the date's 4:00 AM, but it's only 3:00 PM.
So, is that a symptom?
It could be. That could be the fact.
And let's be fully transparent here.
That could be that you got a regional setting,
time zone setting in your operating system that's wrong,
and that has nothing to do with the CMOS.
However, if that time isn't right,
and let's say the date for some reason,
you've set the date and you reboot the computer
and then you boot the computer back up and you're like,
why did it reset itself to two years ago?
Or a year ago, or four years ago.
And that's because that information is getting stored
in that volatile region that the BIOS checks,
and the way the power is retained,
remember I said volatile?
When we turn the computer off, those settings are lost.
The way we retain those settings
is through what's known as a CMOS battery.
That's complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
is what the acronym means.
And you know what it is really for us
as normal human beings, I would say;
is really nothing more than a watch battery.
I thought you were going to say a watch battery.
Yeah, a watch battery is how we retain these settings.
And most of your motherboards,
in fact, all your motherboards pretty much,
are going to have one of these watch batteries.
And I know you are a watch fishiano.
I have a few of them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if it isn't just a winding of the watch,
and it's not keeping time,
chances are you’ve probably got to open it up,
you’ve got to replace the watch battery.
Well, it's interesting ‘cause your motherboard settings
are really no different.
Those settings are being retained by the power
that that watch battery is providing.
Now, technically speaking, you would know what battery to get.
It would be what's called a CR 2032,
and that's consistent across the board.
You can go into any hardware store,
and a lot of times you can even go into a supermarket.
And it's just a little flat battery.
In fact, let's go ahead and what do you say
we take a look here on this motherboard
and I'll show you exactly.
Can you see that right there, Zach, that little battery?
- Yes, I see it. - Right there, if I can orient myself right.
So that battery, it can just go bad, right?
Like any other battery.
Now I've seen some of these, honestly,
I can tell you with these lower-powered systems, Zach,
that the whole entire battery,
I've never had to replace it once.
I've got a couple of motherboards, systems I should say,
that are 10 years old.
And the battery's never once been… it never lost charge.
I don't know how it happens, but you know.
And then I've had other ones where we've had them
in a production environment for a year,
maybe two years; you know,
maybe a little bit more than a year, maybe two years,
and we've got to replace the battery.
So, there is kind of a rule of thumb that I say:
if you've had a computer…
and we know computers upgrade really really fast,
technology goes and we get left in the dust
if we don't stay up to date.
But a lot of people have computers,
like a workstation, a desktop if you will,
that they've had for a long time and it works just fine,
maybe there's no reason to upgrade.
So rule of thumb I say is: every three years,
replace that battery whether you need to or not.
It’s a regular, scheduled maintenance.
Yeah, it is, it really is.
And in fact, one of the technical institutes that I worked for
when we were doing support for…
we had a Dell contract and we had, I want to say
somewhere between 100 and 200 Dell workstations.
It sounds like a lot and it is,
but it's really divided up by classroom.
There were somewhere around
like 20 computers per classroom, 10 classrooms.
So right around 200, if I do my math.
We won't do that.
And then what we would do is,
we had them on a set schedule where we would say,
okay, we're going to go into classroom one
because it's time, it's three years.
We're going to run through classroom one.
We're going to do that,
and then we're going to mark that down
as part of our scheduled maintenance,
and then we're going to move into two
and then move into three,
move into four and so on and so forth.
It's a fairly easy thing to do.
So what do you say we show you
how to replace that CMOS battery,
and that should be just a part of PC maintenance,
whether it's failing or not.
But if it is failing, then you definitely have to replace it.
So let's replace it.
Sure, let's go ahead.
So let me go ahead and shine a little bit of light
on the situation here.
And I'm going to take this screwdriver over here,
and Zach, can you hand me that little battery that's right there?
There we go.
It just happened to be there. It magically appeared.
So I'm going to go ahead.
And one of the first things I'm going to do,
notice I am taking electrostatic discharge protection.
And I think that makes perfect sense.
Any static wrist strap, and there's just a little clip here,
and if I do this to where I can keep my hands out
so you can see, notice that I just flipped that up and that's it.
We pull that battery out and wait for the grand finale.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to put that right there.
That's it. That's all it is.
Well, nice talking to you.
We’ll see you next time!
Now I will say that we're not quite done.
Because what we've actually done
is we've removed the power from that;
it doesn't reset those settings.
So what we have to do, is we have to boot back into BIOS.
Because if you think about it, the battery's failing,
the power's lost, those settings get erased.
And I wanted to ask you;
taking the battery out, that brief amount of time,
that doesn't hurt anything, does it?
No, it doesn't hurt anything,
but the settings, since the battery's failed, right?
When you take that battery out, you have to go back in
and you have to reset the system clock,
and then you have to verify that the BIOS,
any configurations that you've made to it,
you kind of have to make those again.
So, we're not completely out of the woods yet.
What we have to do is, so what do you say we go ahead
and we'll put the computer back together.
Yes, please do.
We'll grab us a keyboard, we'll grab us a mouse,
we'll connect this thing to the monitor
and we'll boot into BIOS like we've seen before;
just remember, check with your vendor
on how you get into BIOS.
For me, it just happens to be pushing F12 on the boot screen.
Which you like to do.
Yeah, absolutely.
I sit there and repetitively hit it until we boot in.
And then when we get back, what we'll do is,
we'll be in that BIOS screen
and we'll see how we can configure the settings,
reset our CMOS.
Well, basically our CMOS settings.
- I want to see it. - Let's do it.
Okay, Wes. We replaced the battery,
and have you already booted us back into BIOS?
Yeah, I went ahead
and there's a critical message that I want you to see.
So, if we take a look here, you're going to see;
notice it tells us, “BIOS has been reset”.
Yes!
“Please re-configure your BIOS setup items if needed”.
Now, I want to say something though, Zach;
if your CMOS battery is failing,
and it doesn't have the power,
it's going to show you the same setting.
So that is a tell-tell sign, when you booted into BIOS
and it shows you that setting,
that's another way to diagnose the CMOS battery has failed
because every time it reboots, it's saying,
“Hey, you've just reset your BIOS.”
Well, we actually replaced the battery.
We did.
So the end result is the same.
If there's no power because the battery's lost,
or there's no power ‘cause you just removed it
and replaced it, that screen you're going to see either way.
So, it's a couple of ways that you can tell.
But will it tell us if the battery's good?
I'll tell you what, let's go ahead and find out,
and I'll show you exactly what it will say.
So, if we take a look here,
we're going to go ahead and say ‘Ok’ to this,
and notice that it is finding…
it found our hard drive, it found the Boot Manager.
So it knows that the hard drive is still there,
but let's go ahead and go into the setup,
and see what we have here.
Now, one of the things that I'm noticing right away
is that it is set to French.
I don't speak French.
I almost said it was set to France.
Parlez-vous Francais?
That's right.
So, this might be where this motherboard came out of;
I'm not exactly sure here.
So what I want to do is I want to change it back to English here.
And when we look at that,
these settings might actually take when we reset again,
or when we restart the computer.
Now that that battery is actually holding those settings,
when we reboot the computer,
we should see that it's still going to be in English.
Let me show you one more thing here, too.
If we get out of this easy mode
and we go into Advanced Mode,
this is where you can find a little bit more about
some of the settings within the system and stuff.
And notice that, if we go into…
not there, we go into System settings.
Notice our date and time here.
Do you know what time is it currently, Zach?
- It is almost 5 o'clock. - Almost 5 o'clock.
So, is that time right there 16:12?
If we take off 12, what would that be?
That would be 4 o'clock, right?
It'd be 4, right.
So the system time isn’t quite right.
If you can help me out with that time again; what is it?
Almost 5 o'clock?
So, it's basically 16:53.
Okay, so 16:53; if we add 12…
I can do this.
That's what… 16…
Whoops, and I got out of that.
Let me get back to where we are.
You’ve got to tab through these and that doesn't help.
So 16… and when it’s going to say 53,
notice how that clock reset itself?
Right.
That's something that is a tell-tell sign
that the battery was failing.
In this case, we know we replaced the battery.
So just that brief moment of unplugging an old bad battery
and replacing it, also made it go the same way.
So, we'll go ahead and what we'll do is,
we'll just go ahead and save and exit these settings;
and notice it asks us if we want to exit without saving,
or we want to save and exit.
We'll just go ahead and choose to save the setup,
and then at this point, all we have to do, we just click Yes.
And then from there, that's all it is,
our BIOS is now reconfigured.
Now, this was a basic setup.
I do want to just leave you with one word of caution.
If you have things like RAID configurations,
where you have multiple hard drives,
if you have a fan set, or if you did some of the…
A game maybe.
If you are in a game, there's another one.
If you're in a gaming mode
where you've got some of those advanced settings
that are tweaked; all of mine were set to auto.
And that's the defaults,
so I don't have to go back and reconfigure those.
But, if you have power settings that you've kind of reconfigured,
if you've got a clock or a multiplier that you've gone
and really kind of peaked and tweaked,
to push more voltage, if you're doing overclocking,
which we're not going to get into…
That’s a whole other thing.
You have to reset those settings.
The good thing for the one that we were doing right here
is that it's all the defaults,
so the only thing that we had to change was the date
if applicable, and the time in our case.
And the other thing was language setting.
We click save, it'll reboot the machine,
and when we reboot our machine,
our system clock should be retaining those settings now.
So that's one of those big signs
that the CMOS battery has failed.
That's also how you replace it, reconfigure it,
and get yourself back up and running.
Well, I want to tell you, Wes,
my buddy's going to be very happy.
- Thank you. - Your friend will, absolutely.