On 11/11/2015 10:30 AM, Norm X wrote:
Hi,

I'd like to thank the activists here for all the help. Last year, I tried
to upgrade the my BIOS. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the 3V CMOS battery
was dead. I ran into all sorts of problems, like BIOS checksum errors. I
was happy to downgrade, so I could continue using my 3 drive RAID 0 storage
array, that needs to be setup in the CMOS BIOS program. This year with a
good battery, flashing an upgrade to the BIOS went smoothly, no errors. In
a few days when my heart settles down, I will replace the dual core with a
(presumably good) used quad core CPU.

Who would have imagined that a tiny mercury battery would be important?

X

I hope that it wasn't really a mercury battery -- they've been banned for a
long time and I don't recall any PCs that actually used them. More likely a
silver-oxide cell although I had at least one machine that actually used a
battery pack with four AA cells.