Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!udel!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!ralf
From: ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: CompuAdd
Keywords: AT, 286
Message-ID: <6040@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 3 Sep 89 01:31:58 GMT
References: <719@dtix.dt.navy.mil> <14015@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 21

In article <14015@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> drk@athena.mit.edu (David R Kohr) writes:
}2.  The battery-backup has occassionally failed (I think), so that we
}    had to re-run the ROM Setup program (I'm not the official PC support
}    person in my group, so I don't recall this problem very well--I may
}    be mixing this up with just having the batteries run low).

You may simply have gotten some of the buggy clock chips that occasionally
scramble their non-volatile RAM on powerup.  Or the "power-good" signal is
asserted a few microseconds too soon (people have reported fixing lost setups
by adding a resistor between power-good and ground to delay its assertion).

In my case, I lose the setup every couple of months (used to be two or three
times a month, but has gotten lots better over the past 2.5 years).  When I
dumped the CMOS RAM after a bootup error, I always found that one or two 
locations had been copied into other locations, and one or two other locations
zerod.
-- 
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