CMOS cheksum bad?

[martian_aphid]

Good morning,

Over the past couple of days I've been getting some problems when I boot up my computer. It first happened yesterday when I booted up my machine and, instead of the single beep I'm used to, it gave me multiple beeps. Unfortunately I wasn't listening properly so I am not entirely sure whether it gave me 3 short beeps or 4 (according to the manual 3 would be VGA and 4 is hardware failure). I didn't have the monitor on at the time so I didn't see any POST messages but when I turned it on I was greeted with an option to enter the BIOS, which I did, and took a quick look around and was unable to see anything out of the ordinary. I then left the BIOS and everything booted up fine and I couldn't see any a VGA issue so I thought it was just a random event and thought nothing more of it.

Then again today, upon startup I got the standard single POST beep but it came up with the message: "CMOS checksum bad" and gave me options of F1 to enter setup and F2 to load default settings. I hit F1 and noticed my BIOS was wiped of all settings which I proceeded to re-enter, save and boot up.

I'm a bit confused as to what is going on - is there some program I can check my hardware for problems with, some diagnostics I can run to figure out what the issue is here?

This is my basic spec:

Asus Maximus Formula X38
Intel Q6600
4X2GB G-Skill PC2-6400
Gigabyte Radeon HD4870

For clarity, all components are running stock as the machine is used for work and I need the stability over the extra performance.

I'm a bit confused as to what exactly is happening as I haven't had these issues before so any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Demonwar]

Possibly a failing cmos battery. Any powercuts/suddent losses of power effected the machine?

[chuckskull]

Sounds like a failed CMOS battery to me too. New ones only cost a few quid, your local maplins should have one, but before you go get one might be worth reseating your current on, they can come loose quite easily. This would probably cause the 4 beep POST code too.

As your issue only seems to be happening at boot and no problems at load, diagnostics programs probably won't help, as most basically just load your computer and see if it crashes. 3Dmark or furmark will do for that if you want to give it a go. As would your favourite graphics heavy game. Might be worth giving your event viewer logs a look too. Though I wouldn't expect anything from the symptoms you're describing.