Alright, so I have kind of a weird problem. I will start with a short story. Built a brand new system, got it all together installed the os, everything was fine. I installed another cd drive and another hard drive and the system would no longer post. took them out again and it still didn't post. by this time i was pretty mad. I plugged it all back in and tried it, still didn't get anything, fiddled with everything a bit, finally decided to reset the cmos, and it all worked just fine. I went reset the clock in the bios and everything and it was just peachy. It worked forever until one day we lost power, went to boot it back up, and it did the same thing. reset the cmos and again it works just fine. It seems whenever I either had components on the inside (usb doesn't effect it) or it loses power the cmos needs to be reset for it to post. this has be pretty confused, and its really not a huge deal, just a pain. so does anyone have any ideas on why it would do something like this? I think it may just be a bad motherboard, right now I am at work and I don't remember what the model was, but it is a msi board, with an AMD cpu.
Idea: As symptoms only arise once mains power is disrupted, sounds like a faulty/flat/missing motherboard battery for BIOS settings/clock ? Typically a simple swap out - once you've found it and what battery # you need - could be worth it for the sake of a £1-3 part, given all the hassle you're having.
seems so simple now that someone says it. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that it had something to do with adding drives or something. It makes perfect sense. Basically the mobo was probably sent with a bad battery. I will have to pick up another batter and give it a try. Thanks for your help on something that should be obvious.
