stephen pearce wrote:
Further to my post yesterday ... I pulled out the flash rom chip ... and removed the cmos battery ... left things for a few hours .. then reinstalled .. and it booted .. fine .. then reset it and the same problem recurred .. then reinstalled flash rom but left cmos battery bu out and left overnight .. .. it rebooted ok .. I wonder whether some of the memory in the flash rom has "gone stale" i.e. is returning equivocal logic values ... if so is this due to flash failure or the expected degradation of memory in a flash device after 4 years? Alternative is static damage at a gate level which is intermittantly casuing failure .. hdd seems to be reliable ... I plan to re flash the rom when I get home
If leaving the battery for the CMOS out fixes it, it seems more likely that there is a problem with the CMOS RAM or battery rather than the Flash-ROM. Is the battery flat? Are there any signs of damage from battery leakage? Regards, Jon