[SOLVED] Replaced CMOS battery and installed new CPU, now getting BSOD on bootup

[Nova43]

I swapped out the old i7-920 with an i7-990X. And I replaced the old cmos battery with a new one. I also took out the RAM sticks to get them out of they way of me working with the cpu cooler. Then I put the RAM sticks back after I was done. I booted up to find that the BIOS was completely reset. I redid the BIOS settings then saved, exited, and rebooted. Bootup shows a jmicron message about eSata and "no drives found". Then it shows the windows logo with spinning dots. After that, it shows a blue screen of death. I disabled the jmicron feature in the BIOS. Although the jmicron screen does not show, I'm still getting a BSOD. I have the vanilla Asus P6T mobo as shown in my signature below. What can I do to fix this issue? Thanks.

 

[Nova43]

I found the issue. I changed the SATA configuration to AHCI instead of IDE. Now everything is working.

 

[Paperdoc]

Good find, and congrats on solving this. Background, FYI. During the work you did your mobo's BIOS chip lost power for long enough that it lost its memory of your settings. So at new power-up it loaded the factory default settings, but not all of them were what your system needs. ONE of those was the SATA port configuration. Older BIOS's had an "IDE" option which forced the SATA ports NOT to use the new AHCI configuration and operate using a more limited subset of signals for IDE devices. This was to make it easy for people with older hardware (like IDE HDD's, etc) to use the newer mobos. But if you have real SATA drives it is better to use their full capabilities by setting to AHCI Mode. The "trick" is that an HDD already containing data written in one of those two Modes can NOT be read and used if your SATA port is configured the wrong way, so you can't boot up that way. You found the right way to re-configure your SATA ports to use your HDD's.

 

[Nova43]

Good find, and congrats on solving this. Background, FYI. During the work you did your mobo's BIOS chip lost power for long enough that it lost its memory of your settings. So at new power-up it loaded the factory default settings, but not all of them were what your system needs. ONE of those was the SATA port configuration. Older BIOS's had an "IDE" option which forced the SATA ports NOT to use the new AHCI configuration and operate using a more limited subset of signals for IDE devices. This was to make it easy for people with older hardware (like IDE HDD's, etc) to use the newer mobos. But if you have real SATA drives it is better to use their full capabilities by setting to AHCI Mode. The "trick" is that an HDD already containing data written in one of those two Modes can NOT be read and used if your SATA port is configured the wrong way, so you can't boot up that way. You found the right way to re-configure your SATA ports to use your HDD's.

Thanks. I was surprised that the BIOS settings were reset even though I replaced the CMOS battery immediately after removing it. Thanks for the extra info on AHCI vs. IDE modes.