Check your Computers Battery Before you get into REAL Problems

If the computer was running fine before this happened, chances are that the BIOS battery is bad. The battery is usually a round silver replaceable disk on the motherboard. Simply remove it from it's holder, go to the local store that sells jewelry or watches and get another one. Pop a new one in it's place and your computer will probably remember.

What happens is that the BIOS is a lot like a notebook of instructions that tell the equipment that it's a computer and it has a hard drive, floppy disk, ports, etc. The battery is the power source for the BIOS when the system is turned off so when it goes bad, the system "forgets".

Replacing the battery usually does it because the newer BIOS routines will usually check and re- poll the hard drives, finding the right one and you're back in business.

Still, it's a good reminder to backup your system in case something really bad happens.