Hardware Bios options Changed oO?

[Youkai]

Hi there,
Today at work we had 3 Computer not running any more and even the "professionals" had no idea why.
Now everyone thought it was due to a Program we send over the Server yesterday but than again why only 3 Computer with Problems ?

now I reinstalled the System on another HDD and thought that AHCI was already set in the BIOS as it was in use before and we usually set it to AHCI all the time ... not I noticed it was not set and changed it getting the exact same "Crash" those 3 PCs had ...

I inserted the old HDD again changed boot mode to AHCI in Bios and everything worked fine again oO but no idea why and how it just changed itself especially as the clock still worked else I would have guessed the Bios Battery was empty but than again why 3 PCs at the same time ^^V



Is it actually possible that the Bios was changed due to some error while receiving that program trough the server ???? I thought the BIOS is on a RAM which grants no access trough Windows ...

 

[FAST6191]

There are BIOS update programs you can run from Windows but you do usually have to manually apply such things, actual machine BIOS/CMOS should not be touched by onboard updates. That said I am prepared to see some vendor crapware update it for you and cause the problem, you might also have something slightly better if these are workstation class machines.
On the other hand hard drive/drive controller/motherboard updates can be pushed through Windows update and you might be seeing the effects of one of those, patch Tuesday was the 9th though so unless things got rebooted/delayed updates that would be odd for it to take this long.

Battery might still be a thing (sometimes the time is kept sorted by a and if something else went wrong it might have defaulted to a stock BIOS but left the time in there.

All that said I have had issues installing without ACHI/IDE emulation modes doing things and I have had issues when things need to read drives that they now can not, and I have had the general slowless/lack of throughput that some emulation things can make, I doubt I would have found that option and tried it very early on though.

 

[Originality]

I've seen it happen where a failed POST/boot will cause some BIOS's to reset CMOS as a kind of "revert to known working settings" option. These were on mid-range overclocking motherboards though, so I don't know if this might apply to your case.

 

[jonthedit]

Happened all the time on two Dell Studio 1555 Laptops.
Not sure what caused it, but those damn things loved resetting to factory defaults!

Just curious, are the motherboards either ASUS or DELL?

 

[Originality]

Happened all the time on two Dell Studio 1555 Laptops.
Not sure what caused it, but those damn things loved resetting to factory defaults!

Just curious, are the motherboards either ASUS or DELL?

Now that sounds almost certainly like a faulty CMOS battery.
Edit: also, dell don't make motherboards. They tend to use Biostar motherboards.

 

[Foxi4]

I've seen it happen where a failed POST/boot will cause some BIOS's to reset CMOS as a kind of "revert to known working settings" option. These were on mid-range overclocking motherboards though, so I don't know if this might apply to your case.

This. Motherboards are designed to apply "Optimized Defaults" and if that fails, "Fail-Safe Defaults" whenever there's a serious error in the boot sequence (this may be caused by high temperature, low voltage, RAM problems and a plethora of other issues). Thing is, since it can be triggered by external forces such as "temperature", I'd assume that in borderline cases of overclocking a simple heat wave can make the BIOS think that something "ain't right".

Now that sounds almost certainly like a faulty CMOS battery.

If it happens all the time for no reason, yuuuup.

 

[Youkai]

We use Asus Mainboards here.

My Boss who just came back from his one week trip trough Europe could even tell me in an instant that this Problem we had yesterday was caused by ahci/ide while the other IT guys and me took hours searching for the problem -.-V

at least he could not give a good reason how it could happened .... he suggested it might have been a electricity problem in the night ... weirdly enough that only 3 computer actually had that problem ... well at least for the next time I know where to search

 

[FAST6191]

My favourite for limp home mode was in laptops some friends had some years ago. They decided to do it which included dropping USB to 1.1 speeds, sadly the BIOS was one of those locked down vendor ones which could set date, boot order and not a lot else.

 

[Youkai]

We hardly have any old bios left most of our Systems already have that UEFI Bios and without any restrictions as far as I know ...