In May of 2000, I purchased a motherboard and processor. I got it all hooked up, you know typical, whatever. Booted it up, blah blah, got the latest bios for it, it enabled that life saving S.M.A.R.T features for the hard drives. I was noticing that it had said
 
External Cache: 512 KB, Disabled.
 
I want that enabled, make things better for my system, there wasn't a feature to turn it off or on
 
I also noticed that in my hardware monitor setup in the BIOS, it said
 
Case Opened NO
 
my case is open, I leave one of the side doors off
 
huh?
 
So, today, for some dumb reason, (and this has been happening for about 3 weeks now, but not nearly as much as today). I would reboot my system only to see that the computer would refuse to boot back up. It would reboot, my monitor light would flash that amber color (stating that the computer is off), it was not off, it refused to do the POST checks or anything, black screen..so I would have to shut off the system from the back switch, about once a day. Now, it's about 4 times a day and now it was reseting my BIOS and giving me CMOS Checksum Failures and what not So I got fed up
 
I took the battery out of my motherboard, looking around to see if it had leaked or something
 
Well christ...I couldn't remember which way to put the battery back in and since nothing on the board or in the manual told me how, I just guessed. So I just did that. Turned it on, went into the BIOS only to see, that
 
Case Opened YES
External Cache: 512 KB, Enabled
 
now, was it the fact that I took the battery out and then put it back in, or was the battery in backwards straight out of the manufactuer?
 
Wow, what a mystery, but i'm happy now that it's all fixed up and working RIGHT for a change. and that's why they call me a troubleshooter
 
[ December 30, 2000: Message edited by: jdulmage ]