Asus P5k Premium - Bios clears itself when power is cut to MB

My Bios clears itself when power to the motherboard is cut off.

I have upgraded to the latest bios (version 1101) and put in a new CMOS battery.

Could the anode and the cathode of the CMOS battery be shorted?

Would incorrect RAM settings cause it to reset itself every time? I don't think so, that doesn't make sense to me, but I'm out of ideas

Bios settings are more or less default, except RAM is set to 667 MHZ, do to errors occurring in Vista on the "Auto" setting.

Does the date/time reset too?
If it does, you have a problem with the power supply to the bios; battery, battery housing, tracing from housing to bios chip broke or shorted by sliver of meteal.

If it doesn't then the bios thinks there's a problem with your "overclock" settings and reverts to defaults to protect itself.

Or I may be full of crap, hehe.

Yeah, I think it's an issue with the CMOS getting power from the battery so it can remember my settings. Unfortunately, I don't know what can be done about this.

I took apart the computer and checked out the battery and housing and tried to check the connection to bios, but I couldn't find the bios. It's a lot smaller than it used to be, I'm assuming because I didn't see it. Not much I could see anyway, probably

Hehe, by bios I mean as it's booting up hit DELETE to bring up the bios window to show configurations. See if the time is being blanked too.

try clearing cmos by unpluging power from wall pulling cmos battery and putting cmos jumper on 2/3 for at least 30 min.s btw welcome to the forums
Rich

0-o

Yes, CMOS and time is being cleared too.

w2richwood said:

btw welcome to the forums
Rich

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Thanks for the warm welcome, now please allow me to be a bit of a douche

w2richwood said:

try clearing cmos by unpluging power from wall pulling cmos battery and putting cmos jumper on 2/3 for at least 30 min.s

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I read this many times in forums, for different CMOS problems then mine. My CMOS clears all the time, that's the problem. What does this do? Make sure it's extra clear?

Is this a new build or did the problem just start occuring? What bios version were you running before?

Time being cleared is bad.

The "put on pins 2-3 for 30 minutes" thing, I don't know where that came from, clearing bios with those pins takes like 2 seconds when the computer's off...

Have to ask, is the battery in correctly? ie; not upside down
I think you're going to have to pull the motherboard out and put it on bubblewrap and take a large magnifying glass and a flashlight and look at the tracings around the battery for a shorted or cut tracing.

If you can't find one, then it's the chip itself and those are not replaceable by regular people

clearing cmos with the jumper can help even over nite.cmos should be cleared after a new bios flash every time then on reboot set defualts reboot then set your opions
Rich
a rma maybe in order here asus is easy to work with if you call them

dylskee said:

Is this a new build or did the problem just start occuring? What bios version were you running before?

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I don't know what the previous bios was. Should I try to use an earlier one? It was an earlier bios version than the one I use now, I know that.

I will reinspect the motherboard when I get a chance again

check your cmos battery just becuase its new dont mean its good check with a muti tester
Rich

jimmy154 said:

I don't know what the previous bios was. Should I try to use an earlier one? It was an earlier bios version than the one I use now, I know that.

I will reinspect the motherboard when I get a chance again

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Yeah I would try an earlier version just to rule it out but it really sounds like you have a deeper issue here. Is this a new build or did the board just start having this issue out of no where?

And I would definitely try what Rich has suggested also.

Yeah, it's a new build. I noticed it about a month after I build it since I rarely turn my computer off. Making my problem more of a psychological annoyance than real wasting off time annoyance.

I tested the batteries with a voltimeter. They are both above 3 volts.

The case is a mess though. It might be shorted somewhere although I don't see it. But I didn't see where it was shorted when it didn't power on, but then again I tried seeing if the BIOS remembered it's settings when it was outside of the case and with only the elements plugged in that are needed to post.

I got 2 - md4096kd2-800 PNY memory modules for this board, so I wouldn't have to go into the BIOS at all (hopefully) when it clears itself, but this board doesn't post with those stick or one of them, in the correct slot; A1, I believe is the slot for one. This board doesn't seem to have any QVL memory 2 GB stick though, according to my possibly outdated manual. I should probably stop writing at this point.

I come back when I learn more, hopefully

You should inspect the board for "whiskers" that might have grown between the traces (no joke)especialy on the bios chip...the bios chip is usualy nearest to the clear cmos jumper. These whiskers usualy happen/grow when a device is powered on and off a lot. Seen it on Modern Marvels

Wow. Same problem with my P5K Premium Onyx board. Stored settings in the 2 bios banks remain intact, but the BIOS itself resets along with the time and everything.

Anyone figure this out?

A fix that worked for me

Category 5 said:

Wow. Same problem with my P5K Premium Onyx board. Stored settings in the 2 bios banks remain intact, but the BIOS itself resets along with the time and everything.

Anyone figure this out?

Click to expand...

OK, I know people usually frown upon resurrecting really old threads, so apologies in advance, but I stumbled here after working on a P5K that the owner's not ready to replace just yet and starting exhibiting this behaviour when I thought I'd all finished. I'd only just put the side panel back on, went to power up and bang, the CMOS had cleared itself.

So I thought I'd post a fix that's worked in this case for any poor souls encountering the same problem. Afterall, the more good fixes in the pool, the greater the chance it'll be of use to someone.

So the long and short of it is a E6750 at default clocks and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. The machine was upgraded with an SSD some years ago, and whilst quicker than the HD, it never quite reached its full potention due to the AHCI that Asus had to remove from later BIOS' due to licensing issues.

Anywho, I'd been reading about people having success enabling AHCI by using modded BIOS updates or cross-flashing with a P5KR BIOS. So armed with AFUDOS 211 and a bootable USB, I finally plucked up the courage to try this out. Buoyed by the knowledge I had a working P5K BIOS chip to hand in case the flashing went south.

So I got AHCI working (but be warned, the boarded loses use of 2 of the 5 SATA ports and the JMicron controller only wants to work in IDE mode and not AHCI now, but it's worth the responsiveness AHCI adds). But when turning on after power was previously removed, the machine POSTS ok, one beep, goes through the BIOS splash/logo screen, detects the JMicron drives ok, says "Checking NVRAM" and then bang, two beeps in quick succession and dumps out to the black screen with the bit at the bottom that says Date/Time not set, blaa blaa, CMOS not set, whatever, Press F1 to enter setup and F2 to Load default values and continue. Entering BIOS Setup shows a complete reset of all settings - even the date/time.

Tried the usual, another new CMOS batt, strip the board down to bare minimum, different RAM, different CPU. Nothing helped. A lot of people in other forums point to a bad board. But then I thought, it actually POSTs ok after a cold start. It's only after that it resets and clears the CMOS. Knowing that ASUS boards have this feature called CPR (CPU Parameter Recall) which resets the BIOS in case of a boot failure when overclocking, this behaviour definitely looked like CPR in action.

Also knowing that the P5K (and numerous other Asus boards) apply a small overclock default, I figured it was worth turning that feature off. So you have to switch AI Overclocking from Auto to Manual and then I simply left the CPU, FSB, RAM speeds/multipliers etc on Auto.

Save changes and the problem is gone.

Hope this saves someone tearing their hair out.