cmos battery

[Derek Broughton]

Adric Mitchell wrote:

> The CMOS battery is just a small watch battery on the motherboard.
> I've never had to change one (it's somewhat rare when you do), but
> just buying a replacement battery and popping it in should fix it.

Unfortunately, it's not _always_ a watch battery.  I just replaced a Compaq
laptop CMOS battery that was a little more complicated than that.

> On Jun 15, 2007, at 10:46 AM, norman wrote:
> 
>> The other day, when booting up I pressed 'Esc' in order to select a
>> particular version of the kernel. To be certain I pressed the key
>> several times and, eventually, got a message telling me that there had
>> been a cmos battery failure and to press 'enter' to continue. Booting
>> restarted and I was able to select the kernel I wanted. I now get this
>> message every time I boot.
>>
>> Does this message mean anything disastrous, what adverse effects do I
>> need to look out for and is there any way I can check to see if the
>> message is valid? Please advise.

I think perhaps it _can_ be fatal in Windows, as Windows can do bad things
if the BIOS settings are wrong.  I _don't_ think it can be disastrous in
Linux, just annoying.
-- 
derek