A2100 BIOS boot preventive maintenance

[TickTock_]

AccuMillGuy's recent post got me paranoid about my batteries dying - I have no idea how old they are. So I have two questions:

1) How do you replace the batteries w/o risking losing the factory BIOS on the RT and WS board? Speed? Luck? or both?
2) Is there a working procedure to backup the bios on each board in case it goes bad?



After some unwize activities, I can assert that speed alone isn't sufficient. I measured the voltage on the WS board battery and it was hovering around 2.95V versus a new battery voltage of 3.25 so I decided to replace it (figured there would be a cap to give me a few seconds to swap batteries - WRONG). I carved a tool from a popsicle stick to pop the old battery off w/o chance of shorting the supply then, after a few practice runs, I popped it off and snapped in the new battery. Wasn't off more than one second. However, when I booted the machine, the time was reset and I got a "memory configuration changed" error and OS loader failed to start. I had taken pictures of all the setup screens before this and was able to get the machine running by restoring the values, but I learned that speed isn't the answer. Luckily, my RT board is in better shape (3.07V) so I have time. Since apparently you are hosed if this one gets cleared I am thinking I'll have to use some alligator clips and a spare battery to work out a make-before-break procedure. Sure wish there was a way to save a backup...

[ThePainter]

Pull the realtime board out, plug in a video card, monitor, power supply, and keyboard. Boot it up like a pc, get into the CMOS tables and snap a few photos of those setup screens.

[TickTock_]

I got the impression from other threads on this topic that this would not work and you could not recover the real time board bios using the setup screen. Required some zip file and flash utility I don't have. Has this worked for you (manually editing the setup)?

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