Hi,

That is unfortunate, I never liked computers which attempted to run without some kind of confirmation after BIOS settings are lost. It would have been trivial to add a "CMOS Battery Failure -> Press F11 to enter setup" or something equivalent to this to prevent possible data loss.

Thanks for sharing this, I will keep this in my mind when choosing my next laptop/notebook, Dell was already not one of my preferred manufacturers, this just made them even lower on my "list".

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-22, 02:34:

Hi,

That is unfortunate, I never liked computers which attempted to run without some kind of confirmation after BIOS settings are lost. It would have been trivial to add a "CMOS Battery Failure -> Press F11 to enter setup" or something equivalent to this to prevent possible data loss.

Thanks for sharing this, I will keep this in my mind when choosing my next laptop/notebook, Dell was already not one of my preferred manufacturers, this just made them even lower on my "list".

It says inaccessible boot device and I tried repairing the boot partition but it just kept looping in repair. I even tried their recovery media which you can restore from the cloud, didn't work. Didn't lose anything since I got syncthing on my phone. I got kubuntu installed so hopefully if the cmos settings hard reset, kubuntu will just see through the default settings and allow me to boot on through to the other side.

Could you please specify the exact model & specs of the dell laptop .?

weedeewee wrote on 2026-05-22, 18:32:

Could you please specify the exact model & specs of the dell laptop .?

dell precision 7540 intel core i7 9th gen

Hmm, interesting coincidence of timing.

I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 tower (2016) that I grabbed several years ago. I just threw a SSD in it this week, got a dead battery warning, loaded defaults. I went to install Linux, and it warned me that I needed to disable Intel Rapid Storage Technology. In the BIOS config, SATA mode was set to RAID. I thought that was strange choice for default.

Perhaps RAID mode might be the default across many Dell products.

Fazeshift wrote on 2026-05-24, 23:57:

Hmm, interesting coincidence of timing.

I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 tower (2016) that I grabbed several years ago. I just threw a SSD in it this week, got a dead battery warning, loaded defaults. I went to install Linux, and it warned me that I needed to disable Intel Rapid Storage Technology. In the BIOS config, SATA mode was set to RAID. I thought that was strange choice for default.

Perhaps RAID mode might be the default across many Dell products.

why does it default to being raid on for Intel Rapid Storage Tech factory defaults. I am gonna see if i can disable it via firmware because i wiped my windows for no reason not a loss though just pissed i went through the motions

If you had simply switched it back to AHCI it would have booted right up.

The default is RAID and had been for many years. It is not just Dell either.

Point being, unless you have to switch it to AHCI to install the OS, just leave it on the default setting.

cyclone3d wrote on Yesterday, 00:53:

If you had simply switched it back to AHCI it would have booted right up.

Was about to say. Was it really corrupted? I have an old dell, E6500, and both its main and clock batteries are dead. When I installed Windows 10 I had it set to AHCI in the BIOS, which isn't the default. It does revert after leaving the laptop off for a while, which makes Windows not boot anymore, but works again when I set it back to AHCI.

The main problem is that in order to replace the CMOs battery, you have to disassemble the entire laptop and remove the motherboard which is behind the keyboard and all other components. This is nearly impossible to do (as you also have to put it back together again!) and sadly makes Dell laptops almost worthless after these batteries die. I do not know why such a simple design problem couldn't have been fixed. Could it really have been so hard?

zyzzle wrote on Yesterday, 21:38:

The main problem is that in order to replace the CMOs battery, you have to disassemble the entire laptop and remove the motherboard which is behind the keyboard and all other components. This is nearly impossible to do (as you also have to put it back together again!) and sadly makes Dell laptops almost worthless after these batteries die. I do not know why such a simple design problem couldn't have been fixed. Could it really have been so hard?

Ehh, before I moved positions at work, I could completely disassemble a Dell laptop in about 15 minutes. And it really takes no longer to put them back together. Years before that I worked for a company that did warranty repair for mainly Dell.

You wanna know really difficult, try going back to the Pentium 3 era laptops where you have multiple boards that had to go in at the same time and they had to be wiggled in at the same time because cables were connecting them.

Every since the Pentium 4 laptops came about, it got to be super duper easy comparatively.

A lot of the newer laptop, have the CMOS battery just under thew bottom cover.

If you really want the CMOS battery to be easy to replace, then make a cable and hook it to a regular CR2032 battery and stick it somewhere under the bottom cover provided there is room.