Question "Please enter setup to recover BIOS setting" at every boot, despite fitting new CMOS battery ?

[Pandaman11]

Hello

For the last 2-3 weeks, I always see this screen when booting my PC, after having completely shut off power: https://i.ibb.co/S4KfCbxB/20250515-093757.jpg

I have already replaced the CMOS Battery (is that what it is called?), a CR2032. However, it still keeps appearing. I always set the date & time, click F10 Save & Exit, get a screen that I actually didn't make any changes, and then at the next booting it goes back to 1/1/2014.

Does anyone have an idea why and what else I could do?

Googling, I only found that I should contact the support of my manufacturer. However, my "manufacturer" is a friend who built my PC personally around 10 years ago, and now he's not reacting to my whatsapps anymore.

Thanks

 

[rgd1101]

get a screen that I actually didn't make any changes,

is that an error message?

 

[Misgar]

Does anyone have an idea why and what else I could do?

Remove the battery you recently installed and measure the voltage with a multimeter. If the system time reverts to 1/1/2014, there's a good chance the new battery has gone flat.

A brand new CR2032 should be around 3.25V. I replace them when they're down to 2.50V. Below 1.00V you can't expect them to keep the real time clock running.

Alternatively, you might have fitted the battery upside down, in which case it won't work. + side uppermost.

Finally, some battery holders can end up with a bent side contact, if you use a screwdriver or nail file to prise out the old battery. The result is no connection to the side of the battery and no power for the BIOS chip.

 

[Pandaman11]

is that an error message?

No it's more like an info, this one:

 

[rgd1101]

reset the bios and then try to set the date and time

 

[Pandaman11]

Remove the battery you recently installed and measure the voltage with a multimeter. If the system time reverts to 1/1/2014, there's a good chance the new battery has gone flat.

A brand new CR2032 should be around 3.25V. I replace them when they're down to 2.50V. Below 1.00V you can't expect them to keep the real time clock running.

Alternatively, you might have fitted the battery upside down, in which case it won't work. + side uppermost.

Finally, some battery holders can end up with a bent side contact, if you use a screwdriver or nail file to prise out the old battery. The result is no connection to the side of the battery and no power for the BIOS chip.

According to the website where I got, it should be 3 V. Also, there were two in the package, I can try the other one.

I'll try the upside down thing, but I think I put it the same way like the previous. Anyway, if it's upside down, would it even work to begin with?

Yes, I tried with a screwdriver first, before I found out that there was a mechanism I could simply push with my fingers 🤦‍♂️ But maybe then the damage was already done, who knows.

 

[Pandaman11]

reset the bios and then try to set the date and time

I'll try, even though I believe I already did that before and still got the message "not made any changes"

 

[Gaurav_40]

try these:
https://ibb.co/yF5dfgjg

asd hosted at ImgBB

Image asd hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

https://ibb.co/WNwDyMtv
reference - https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/z170-pro/helpdesk_manual/
hope it helps

 

[Misgar]

Anyway, if it's upside down, would it even work to begin with?

As I said earlier, if the battery is upside down it won't work.

According to the website where I got, it should be 3 V.

That's an approximation. When I check brand new CR2032 batteries purchased recently they're around 3.25V. After a year or two in the computer they drop to around 3.00V.

There might be slight differences depending on battery manufacturer and none of my multimeters have seen the inside of a calibration lab.

If you've dug out an old blister pack of batteries more than 5 years old, they might be starting to deteriorate, but they tend to last ages.

I'll try, even though I believe I already did that before and still got the message "not made any changes"

I get the "not made any changes" on loads of motherboards when I change the boot order of the internal SSDs. It seeem that switching from an M.2 NVMe drive (normal Windows boot drive) to a SATA SSD (emergency backup Windows drive) doesn't count as changing anything.

Try switching off XMP or some other setting and hit F10 and the BIOS should register a change. If not, it's possible the battery isn't making a good connection with the bottom and side contacts. I had this on an old computer where the side contact was bent out of shape. The tiny gap between the contact and the side of the battery was impossible to see, but confirmed with a multimeter.

If you don't have a multimeter, there's no telling if any of your batteries are good or dead. It's no good assuming they're OK even if they're brand new. They might be old stock.

 

[Misgar]

OK, I can see why the lead to the fan on the side panel came off. It's not really long enough, but that's not important. You could buy and extension cable to make it longer.

If (and I can't tell for certain) the green X indicates a "fan header" on the motherboard, that's probably where the fan lead came from.

Most motherboards come with 4-pin headers (plug) but your fan comes with a 3-pin socket. That's fine. It simply means you don't have a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) speed control built into the fan. Unless the mobo has voltage control, the fan should run at full speed all the time.

Now here comes the tricky part. The 4-way header has a plastic "tongue" that sticks up from the motherboard and "keys" the socket on the fan cable, so you can't plug it the wrong way round.

The image below shows a 4-pin white socket (on the end of a fan lead) plugged into a black 4-pin header on the motherboard.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/440443/how-to-install-or-replace-a-case-fan.html

The thing to note is the short black tongue between the two ridges (protrusions) on the white fan socket. If you match the ridges on your 3-pin socket and align them with the tongue on the motherboard header, you should get it to fit. It could be a bit fiddly though.

Here is a diagrammatical view of what you're trying to achieve (lower right hand side) where it says:
"3 pin on 4 pin header".

On another point, I couldn't help spotting the inside of your case is quite dusty. I think this might be due to the orientation of the fans on your Noctua CPU cooler. It looks like they're pulling air in through the vent on the rear panel and hot air from the CPU is spilling out inside the case.

With no dust filter on the rear panel vent, if the air flow is (as I suspect) flowing in from the back panel and through the heatsink vanes, you're sucking a lot of dust into the case from the outside world.

The way I have my Noctua NH-D14 and NH-D15 coolers set up, is with the fans mounted the opposite way round to yours. Fan orientation is a personal choice and opinions differ, but I prefer to pull the hot air exhaust from my big air coolers out through the rear panel, instead of heating up the inside of the case.

In this image you can just see a third brown Noctual fan, bolted on the rear panel behind the NH-D14 (top left hand corner). The two fans on the NH-D14 are pulling air in from behind the 5.25" and 3.5" drive bays and hot air is sucked out of the case by the third rear panel fan.
https://www.pctechreviews.com.au/2012/05/26/noctua-nh-d14-reviewed/

This image below gives a better view of the rear panel fan (far left) and shows an additional top panel fan. The air flow through the NH-D14 is from right to left (front to back).

If your case has mesh dust filters on the front panel, it should help to reduce dust intake if you reposition the Noctua fans on the heatsink (as above) and add a 120 or 140mm case fan on the rear panel. It doesn't have to be an expensive Noctua fan. Make sure the all the fans direct air from the front of the case towards the rear.

It should be possible to unclip the Noctua fans and reposition them without pulling the heatsink off the motherboard (requiring new thermal paste for the CPU) but you stand a very good chance of tugging the fans cables off their respective headers on the mobo. Given the size of a big Noctua heatsink, it can be very difficult to plug the fan leads back in, without skinning your knuckles. I sometimes draw blood!

This is the way I set up the airflow in many of my cases:
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/set-up-pc-case-fans-for-airflow-and-performance

Cool air is drawn in at the front (hopefully through mesh dust filters). The CPU air cooler fans (not shown in this diagram) maintain the general front to back direction of the air flow and the rear panel fan draws hot air out of the case.

As it stands, if I'm correct in thinking your Noctua fans are pulling air in from the back, your CPU and GPU are both dumping heat into the case unneccessarily. My apologies if your Noctua cooler is directing air out of the case.

Fan orientation is often open to "hot" debate (pun intended). Other people may disagree with my preference.

CAUTION: If you are tempted to clean your computer take care. People occasionally come on this forum asking for help, when they break something due to over enthusiastic "dusting". This can happen if they're particularly clumsy and use brute force instead of subtle persuasion.

If you didn't build the computer yourself or have doubts, confine dusting to blowing the dust out with air. If you use a cloth duster, you might snag a few more cables and pull them off. Good luck.