BIOS questions (battery replace?)

Factual Questions
1

I have two questions about two machines.

** Machine 1:**Desktop. Asus P6T motherboard, Crucial 256GB SSD boot drive, Crucial 128GB data drive, several other HDDs for storage.

I can’t reboot without going into BIOS and setting the hard drives and boot priority, then saving and exiting. If I don’t, chances are the machine will try and boot into another drive and hang up during boot.

There’s another strange thing about this. I’d been using the 128GB SSD as a Win7 boot drive before cloning it to the 256GB. I haven’t deleted anything from it, I’m not in need of the space. But when the machine tries to boot from it (i.e. when I mess entering setup during reboot), it blue-screens with the basic drive not present/failed code. Since it was the boot drive for over a year, why would that be happening? Could it be because there are BIOS settings for both boot devices and boot priority, and if they’re not set to the same devise things go haywire?

Machine 2: Dell laptop, about four years old. No longer boots. When I try to get to BIOS settings, it hangs on the BIOS screens and responds with incredible lag. That is, I can see the standard Advanced, Power, Boot, etc. screens, but cannot navigate between them. Key presses are responded to several seconds to about a minute later.
My instinct, from years of reading about similar-sounding problems, is to replace the batteries on the boards. But since it’s something I’ve never had to do before, I thought to run the symptoms by the Board and see if that’s the right first mechanical step to take. If not, what other diagnostic steps are there at this stage (I’ve run Memtest on the desktp).
Also, if replace battery, is there a way to save the current BIOS settings so I can reset to the current configuration or do I need to write everything down? Is there anything Windows-wise that can at least read the BIOS states and do the writing down for me?

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

#1 Does sound like a battery problem.

#2 I had a machine like that – tried replacing the battery, flashing the BIOS and a bunch of other stuff but never found a real solution. Usually powering down and retrying two or three times would get it to boot but I eventually just replaced the machine.

3

Seconded

Seen something similar, replacing the board would be a more cost effective option if a BIOS flash does not solve the problem.

4

Can you get a board for a Dell laptop?

ETA: wait on the last question–I asked it reflexively without even Googling. I was just shocked; I build all my desktops, but never thought to look for replacement parts for a laptop. Off to Google…

5

For machine #2, try erasing the BIOS. Might be a jumper for that but if not, try taking out the CMOS battery (in fact all of them) for a good long time.

6

Okay, this is making no sense. I got the batteries in a couple weeks ago and have been waiting for the time to install them. In that time, I’ve restarted my machine a small handful of times.

Since shortly after posting, I haven’t had to go back into BIOS and reset things.

Could this be a case of a weak battery suddenly holding its own for a few days, or is my initial diagnosis off?

If so, does anyone want a CMOS battery?

7

Replace it anyway. CMOS batteries aren’t rechargeable.