Martin McCormick composed on 2019-07-30 12:01 (UTC-0500): > I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running > debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention > to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other > brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some > reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to > the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD > drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive > in. Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that > the boot sequence has fallen back to the useless one where the > floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the > CDROM.
Are these old Dells continuously connected to power whether booted or not? I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear down the 2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens and the battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless 100% use of defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time at least, for me is never. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is religion, not science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/
