Motherboard will not retain CMOS information

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I have an Asus Z87 motherboard with a Haswell i7 CPU and a lot of RAM as well as a new 750W PSU. The problem is that when I do a restart from Windows, the machine is trying to decide whether or not it wants to restart or shut down. It will not retain its CMOS boot information even though I recently changed the CMOS battery. I checked the BIOS and it does not need to be flashed. The company tech support seems to think that this is because I have 2 SCSI drives (which have adaptec PCI express adapter). Once it reads the drives, the machine boots up fairly well without a hitch but it does not want to retain or save the boot up information. To be more precise, it does this inconsistently. Sometimes it will restart normally and sometimes it will hesitate for more than 10 or 15 seconds. I then have to hit either the restart button or turn the machine off and turned on again. Suggestions?[/SIZE]

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I had that with a motherboard – no adapters – that would boot sometime but not others. All you can do is remove the SCSI adapter to prove it’s the mobo – boot from a Linux CD to test.

cheers, Paul

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Then you can also try the device on another PCI express slot if you havn’t done so already.

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You could also look for updated firmware for the PCI-E SCSI card (look up the card’s model number on the adaptec support site).

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You may have a broken connection on the battery clip holder thing. Take the mobo out and hold it under a very strong light. Take the battery out and try to see the connections from the mobo to the clip. Make sure you don’t put the battery in upside down. Extremely good soldering iron skill is needed to repair.

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Do you have any way of checking the voltage on your “new” cmos battery? They are designed to last for years and you may have gotten old stock from your supplier.

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I have an Asus Z87 motherboard with a Haswell i7 CPU and a lot of RAM as well as a new 750W PSU. The problem is that when I do a restart from Windows, the machine is trying to decide whether or not it wants to restart or shut down. It will not retain its CMOS boot information even though I recently changed the CMOS battery. I checked the BIOS and it does not need to be flashed. The company tech support seems to think that this is because I have 2 SCSI drives (which have adaptec PCI express adapter). Once it reads the drives, the machine boots up fairly well without a hitch but it does not want to retain or save the boot up information. To be more precise, it does this inconsistently. Sometimes it will restart normally and sometimes it will hesitate for more than 10 or 15 seconds. I then have to hit either the restart button or turn the machine off and turned on again. Suggestions?[/SIZE]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I appreciate that very much especially since this appears to be a problem inherent in the new generation of motherboards. I went to the Adaptec site and found that The 1st issue is with the UEFI protocol (http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17087/~/adaptec-controllers-and-uefi-motherboards). I guess I should consider myself “lucky” that I was able to modify the boot instructions to legacy. When I had earlier changed the boot instructions to UEFI, the board said that it did not recognize any of my boot devices. When I went back and changed the boot sequence to legacy OPROM the discontinuity became more controllable. I think that this is only part of the problem because my earlier MSI board, which had a traditional bios, had similar problems. The manufacturers don’t want to support SCSI anymore. Unfortunately, these drives last a long time and especially the ones that are 15.5 K RPM which means they generally have some good quality. I did notice that when I installed a 6 TB drive that the machine seem to “run out of gas”; it recognized the drive at all of that but it was basically saying that 6 TB is a lot of real estate to plow through but all the other things going on.

The CMOS battery is spanking brand-new and you are correct that when a board sits on a shelf in someone’s warehouse for any length of time, the batteries will degrade.

The weird thing is that I have had driver problem with the Asus driver CD and luckily have another stash of drivers. If you are installing these type boards and are using the traditional consumer drives, you’re not going to have a lot of problems. I noticed this when I built an i5 Z97 unit last month.

When I set the boot sequence to legacy, the machine finally shut off properly and more or less tried to boot on a restart. That is a good sign but they should not be these kinds of problems in these more “advanced” motherboards.

Again I want to thank all of you for your responses.

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…The manufacturers don’t want to support SCSI anymore…

Fits with my experience.

I can’t recall working on any computer having SCSI HDD(s) since about 2000 (most of my customers are home users, but some have small businesses).

SCSI HDDs have always tended to be used more for servers than stand-alone (or “workstation”) PCs in any case. So it is not surprising that the motherboard manufacturers should stop supporting what they probably consider as “obsolete” or “irrelevant” technologies.

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