"janger" wrote in message
...
Hey all.

My computer started acting up a few days ago and it's driving me crazy
trying to work out the problem.

So for now I just want to ask: Can a bad or flat cmos battery cause
things such as hard disk crash

Define "crash". As most people think of the term, NO. A bad CMOS battery
can cause a hard drive not to be detected on system startup, but that
doesn't mean that the hard drive has crashed. All the data is still there,
but the PC can't access the drive.

, IDE problems,

That depends on what problems you are talking about. If the system is up
and running (in windows for example) and you are having trouble accessing
IDE hard drives, that's not a CMOS battery problem. A CMOS battery
problem -could- cause all of your IDE drives not to be detected. But in
that case, you'd likely never get the computer to boot into windows.

and maybe even dvd
burner firmware corruption?

Anything can cause anything, but if a CMOS battery caused DVD burner
firmware corruption, it would be the first such case I've ever heard of.

I'll go out on a limb here and state (based on your questions) that you are
probably dealing with a power supply problem or a mainboard problem not
related to the CMOS battery. But replacing the CMOS battery won't hurt
anything. Try clearing CMOS settings while you are at it. -Dave