On 28/09/05, stephen pearce <pearce.sg(a)gmail.com> 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 it is 4 years I would say it is far more likely your CMOS battery is failing and doing funny things to BIOS parameters... losing power resets it to defaults rather than corrupts RAM. Makes much more sense now as I have seen this on lots of old machines... funny boots on old machines means I usually have to replace the lithium battery... Ian