I just found battery acid on my CMOS battery!

Hi all.

For the last few years, I have had the Gigabyte 8INXP board, and for some reason that baffled me and everyone on this forum for a year, was my machine not booting when it powered on.
It (until a few minutes ago) would power on, screen staying black and do nothing.
It would attempt to restart by itself and again and then maybe boot into Windows successfully. Otherwise I would turn it off and try the whole process again.

A few minutes ago, I realised I never reset the CMOS, so i booted down and took out the battery, only to find a large drop of brown liquid on the top of the battery. I wiped it off, and left the CMOS 10 minutes to reset itself.

And lo and behold, it has booted EVERYTIME and restarted EVERYTIME.

Does anyone have an explaination for this? It couldn't have been shorting, because it booted eventually all the time, and the PC never randomly shut down, so what was it doing?




Oh yeah,

I've never heard of a CMOS battery leaking before but theres always a first time

Given how cheap they are I'd buy another one

Make sure the liquid didn't come from a leaking capacitor near by -there have been lots of issues with capacitors leaking

I assume your problem, whatever it was, was straightened out by clearing the CMOS

Alls well that ends well!

Regards, Balrog

voodoomelon said:

Does anyone have an explaination for this? It couldn't have been shorting, because it booted eventually all the time, and the PC never randomly shut down, so what was it doing?

Click to expand...

It was tripping! What else would it do on acid?
Actually it sounds like it was making bad contact. Once the computer is booted there is nothing running off the battery.

rseven said:

Once the computer is booted there is nothing running off the battery.

Click to expand...

Excellent point! It must have been making a bad contact alright.
Anyways, it's working perfectly now, it has restarted and booted several times since, with no problems what so ever.

Unusual, but not unheard of. The battery in my friend's old P1 system leaked and acid
destroyed some of the traces. Fortunately we were able to find another board
at a PC show. It was one of those under monitor desktop cases BTW.