holly_walker76•3d agoProlific Poster

That time a server crashed at 2 AM and I fixed it with a paperclip

I was working a late shift at a small office in Des Moines last month when their file server just stopped responding. The power light was on but no network activity at all. Turns out the CMOS battery had died and the BIOS reset to default SATA settings, so the RAID array wasn't recognized. I had to manually short the clear CMOS pins with a paperclip from my desk to get it to boot again. Has anyone else run into weird BIOS glitches that looked like hardware failure?

3 comments

3 Comments

finley7293d ago

Man I used to think CMOS battery stuff was just what people blamed when they didn't know what else to check, but that paperclip trick really opened my eyes. I had a similar thing happen with an old home PC where it just refused to see any drives at all, turned out the clock was reset to 2002 and the BIOS freaked out. It's wild how something so small and cheap can make a whole machine look completely dead when it's actually fine. I've been way more careful about swapping those little batteries out on schedule ever since, it saves a ton of headache later.

anderson.david3d ago

Paperclip trick fixed it, battery cost a buck, saved me from trashing a perfectly good motherboard.

keith_rodriguez3d ago

Reading that the BIOS freaked out just because the clock was reset to 2002? That is absolutely WILD to me. I mean I knew those settings were picky but I didn't think they cared about the actual YEAR that much. That basically means if your battery dies on a Friday and you don't notice until Monday the whole thing could just give up for no real reason. That's honestly terrifying because it's such a tiny detail that nobody thinks about. I've been guilty of ignoring those little batteries for years and now I'm probably gonna check my own rigs tomorrow.

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