CMOS: battery low, wrong memory size

Submitted by libervisco on Tue, 2007-11-06 14:09.

Posts: 3856
Joined: 2006-05-04

My dad brought an old computer to my flat hoping I could get it to work. At first when I turn it on it just said CMOS Battery Low, but proceeded to try to boot from the hard drive, which apparently had a GRUB in MBR left back from the days the drive was actively used (with GNU/Linux). However since the keyboard wouldn't work no matter if I hook it up to an USB port or via the converter to a PS/2 port I thought I'll try to reset BIOS by clearing CMOS.

But after I did that I persistently started getting this, without even proceeding to the HD boot (basically I made it worse).

CMOS Battery Low
CMOS Wrong memory size

I even bought a new CMOS battery, same standard model, put it in but it still wouldn't work.

Ideas are appreciated. Would be nice to get this old compy to work. (It's an AMD Duron 750Mhz, 176 MB PC-100/133 RAM, 15GB HD).

Thanks

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Wed, 2007-11-07 20:40 Reading elsewhere the way

libervisco

Posts: 3856
Joined: 2006-05-04

Reading elsewhere the way to resolve this is exactly what I've been doing, replace the CMOS battery, reset it and enter BIOS to configure again.

But the snag I'm hitting is the keyboard. For some reason it wont work through neither the USB nor the PS/2 port. Both of the keyboards I have wont work, although the other one (which I use for my main computer) is wireless (but can also be connected to USB or through converter PS/2).

So.. I guess one option I have left is to try the old keyboard my sisters are using, just swap these two.. and see if that would work. Maybe this one is just not compatible for some weird reason.

Can BIOS issues like this one (with CMOS battery) really disable even PS/2 ports?

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