On 05/24/2017 11:40 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 05/24/2017 09:20 PM, William Mattison wrote:
> The clock (and the CMOS battery) got some attention while trying to
> fix the boot problem. I have not yet replaced the battery, but I'm
> not seeing any problems. What is the likelihood that the battery or
> the clock caused the boot failure?
If the battery's weak enough to mess up the CMOS, it's possible.
However, long before that, your hardware clock will start to run slow.
(This is, actually a built in feature. It's intended to let you know
that it's time to change the battery.) If you can go into the CMOS
setup, before it tries to boot, see if everything looks right, and that
the clock is right. If it's slow, turn things off without correcting
it, and try again in a few hours. If it's farther behind, change the
battery and see if that helps. I don't know if it's still true, but the
Print Screen key used to work there, and if so, you can use it to get a
printout of your settings to be used later if needed.
I agree with Joe. I'd imagine the battery would only cause issues if the
BIOS got messed up somehow. A slow clock wouldn't necessarily cause a
boot issue--but you might get a lot of weird "file date is in the
future" errors caused by the OS looking at the clock (which is slow) and
comparing it against file dates (which were set using the correct time).
This can also cause strangeness with LDAP and Kerberos authentication or
Samba operations as they're time-sensitive.
Otherwise, with a weak battery the BIOS will usually revert to default
settings which are generally considered conservative and "safe". If it
only managed to partially set up the defaults, weird stuff can happen.
Note that if you had modified the boot order from the BIOS-based
defaults, then you'd usually see the boot stall at the device selection
point. If you set some other things (disk caches, memory timings, wait
states and other items which gamers tend to mess with) then it could
cause additional funkiness.
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