Dangers of Hard Resetting CMOS?

I recently had a problem with my monitor/computer so I manual power-drained it or whatever you call it (Disconnect from power supply, then hold ON button for 30s-1m) and then my ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard would stay silent when I tried to turn it on.

No life apart from a little green light indicating the motherboard has power.

Turned out that a mischievous friend changed the hard drive with a non-compatible hard drive. So I changed the drive back (On a different computer) and I looked on the Internet and many websites recommended hard resetting CMOS and I was just wondering if there are any dangers at all of resetting it.

I have had continued problems with this machine but I feel that admitting defeat and getting a computer to replace it would be against my morals generally, as well as I spent 10 hours setting up Linux Debian on it and various other programs (WINE etc)

 

Hi,

I'm not sure what you mean by hard resetting CMOS? When you unplug and hold the power button for a minute you set CMOS to defaults since you break the connection to the the CMOS battery which was allowing current settings to be saved. So you have reset CMOS. When you power up your computer it is now reading the CMOS information from the ROM chip and starting with default settings.

Flashing BIOS would be rewriting the ROM chip with a new set of instructions.

Are you saying your computer does not turn on at all since clearing CMOS?

 

I'm curious at the to the "incompatible hard drive" as well.

 

It was a 40GB Seagate previously used for a mini tower computer with a HDD cable connector instead of a SATA cable connector.

 

Either I haven't wrote clearly enough or you don't understand. Let me clarify.

By hard reset I mean taking out the CMOS battery for 5 minutes then putting it back in.

I have not reset CMOS yet. I held the power button on my monitor, not computer.

I will say what the results are once I have cleared CMOS.

 

Ok, yes you are safe to reset the CMOS by removing electric power and removing the battery for a minute or two. All this does is discard any user set preferences and loads the manufacturer's defaults. (Unplugging and holding the computer's power button, accomplishes the same thing but removing the battery is the preferred method.)

 

Hi,

To be sure the CMOS has actually reset just check the date and time. It should be many yrs back and the wrong time. Power button probably does nothing for it.

Jim