Hatrack River Forum: Techi CMOS mayfly

This is topic Techi CMOS mayfly in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :

I installed 2000 pro on an HP Pavillion that had ME on it. I reformatted and installed from a Microsoft disc.

I am no longer able to boot to CMOS. I have tried every function key, delete, esc, end, alt, control..EVERYTHING.

When I pause during the POST, there are never directions about what key to press to get into CMOS. I really need to get in to assign my onboard video card more ram for a program. I got 512MB ram on the system.

I have put in a copy of msconfig in the system, but I think that only helps you get into safe mode.

Are there any ideas? No one has responded for several days on the techi forum I frequent. Thank you!

Posted by Earendil18 (Member # 3180) on :

Is there a physical jumper on the motherboard that you can use to reset the CMOS?

Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :

Do you know the motherboard model? Or system model if it's a prebuilt (HP, Dell, whatever)? Should be able to look it up online as far as how to get into the BIOS.

Posted by BaoQingTian (Member # 8775) on :

What Earendil said. Usually there's a jumper on the motherboard that has the jumper over just 1 pin.

1) Power down the system.
2) Put the jumper over both pins.
3) Power up the system
4) Power down the system (if this is not automatic)
5) Put jumper back to original position.

This will clear your BIOS of the stored values. Your MB manual should tell you which jumper does a reset, although the instructions are rarely in clear English. Also, just to make sure I understand, your system does boot to windows, right? It works except you're unable to access the BIOS?

[Aside]
Also CMOS is kind of dated, might get more responses with BIOS. CMOS technically stands for complimentary metal oxide semiconductor. It refers to chips. BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System, which would refer to the software. Of course, that's just from memory so if I"m wrong, sorry.
[/aside]

Posted by Earendil18 (Member # 3180) on :

A lot of problems seem to go away whenever the CMOS is reset, so if you can't even get to POST try that.

Now that I reread your original post more carefully [Blushing]

, it appears you can't get into the BIOS via the normal "Del"etc.

Sometimes w/the brand computers they have funky ways of getting in. F1 and Alt-F2 come to mind, you could check the documentation that came with the computer.

You could also try getting into your OS, downloading a utility like awdflash, and the newest bios for your mobo, then reboot into msdos or the windows "repair" function via cd, then using the awdflash utility, upgrade your BIOS to the latest version you downloaded.

Savvy? [Wink]