I could also try reseating the bios IC.

If it works without the battery it should be fine. I would not mess with hot plugging the battery unless absolutely necessary.

And of course now that I've prepped the rom file, I can't get rhe pc to go into the bios anymore so I can't flash.

Could this be a dying bios IC? And is cmos part of the same ic?

After unplugging everything possible from the pc, I could enter the bios and flash it. Now the pc works with battery in it.

Next: reconnect stuff and try...

Is the BIOS chip removable? Do you have an IC programmer to reprogram it manually?

Sorry my post came through a bit messy. It is removable, I have no programmer, but I got things going and flashed.

Everything minus the hd6850 hooked up: still works!

So either all is fine now, or the psu is too weak, or the hd6850 is broken in a weird way, or it's because I put it in the top pcie port...

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2025-09-26, 14:31:

Could this be a dying bios IC? And is cmos part of the same ic?

My guess would be that IC itself is fine, but data stored in it has degraded enough to not be always reliably readable. Judging by the fact that simply reflashing it even with the same version of BIOS works.

AFAIK CMOS would be in chipset on this boards and "BIOS IC" is just a EEPROM.

Nice that it ultimately worked though.

I'm starting to suspect the multi card reader, possibly combined with low cmos battery... its led sometimes stayed on. And now with it unplugged, the pc works so far.

And the pc got stuck at the point of detecting usb drivers and going towards sata.

Jup, pc seems rock solid now with the multi card reader unplugged.

I'll swap in the one from the Dell.

Diagnosis is difficult when two things fail dynamically, simultaneously. 😀

Ah crap...after being unplugged for an hour he fails to continuing booting after POST again. I assume BIOS is ok now. It must be something else.

Here is where he stops (but doesn't freeze):

No card reader plugged in, only mouse and keyboard on usb.

Removed a lot of stuff from the pc again, to no avail. Now he decided to go from 6 cores activated to 5 again, and ddr now is at 1067, so seemingly still random bios changes.

Pffffffff.... any ideas?

Ram is now recognized as 3839mb instead of 4095 or whatever it has been, likely also due to bios changes.

Bad bios? Bad psu?

And I got it running again by unplugging everything. The last step was sound card and all usb stuff. I don't know which solves it. Seems to be a usb issue. When the pc was still working, it said usb mouse and keyboard after post. Now it didn't, just "done" even though mouse and keyboard work.

Any important bios settings related to this?

Bios had usb as first boot. I've changed that to hdd.

I'm now only using onboard usb. No extra front ports, no card reader. We'll see in an hour.

I might hav FINALLY found the issue. The front USB port cable was pinched between the mobo and the case. You can see some pin holes in it. So if that pulled some unexpecting lines to gnd or 5V, you get mayhem. I've rerouted them and we'll see in an hour. I have not yet reinstalled other components.

What have we learned: cable management leads to no good. Clean is mean, nest is best.

It still works!

Installed everything now, and we'll see tomorrow.

It still works, so that problem seems solved. Installing all drivers now, just fighting with the HD6850: it installs Catalyst and all around it, but all I get in the hardware overview is a "vga adapter" with exclamation mark and no driver installed... I'm trying a different version of the driver now.

When using the HD6850 instead of the onboard GPU, should the Bios setting be PCI-...-...-...?

Edit: with version 13.9 it works! With 14.4 it didn't.

Test 1: Far Cry with everything maxed out runs smooooth so far. Of course, Far Cry ain't Crysis. Th at will be the next test.