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General discussion

how do i restore settings after cmos battery fails

by jtoks Feb 16, 2009 3:56AM PST

im trying to help a friend having a computer problem. his problem is that his windows xp reverted back to the settings he had several years ago. all his files are there but for example his microsoft word files wont open because windows says word is not installed. it prompts to install word 2003 when he installed word 2007 last year. i checked around online, went into his bios settings, but his date and time settings are set to this exact date. one forum i read suggested that when a cmos battery dies, it will revert to the previous installation of the cmos battery and will start again from that date. unless im missing something entirely, i need help here.

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4 Posts
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The CMOS settings . . .
by Coryphaeus Feb 16, 2009 4:06AM PST

have nothing to do with software installed or files and folders. It sounds more serious. Why did this happen? What you describe sounds like a system restore gone bad. Is this person running an AV program and have you done scans for virus and malware? Quiz your friend and find out what he was doing when this happened.

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answer
by jtoks Feb 16, 2009 4:38AM PST

im not entirely sure how it happened. my friends wife apparently came to the computer and it said press f10 to restart, she did and he came to it after it had restarted with a "welcome to windows xp, please click next to begin installation" screen. this apparently happened last thursday, i reverted the bios date to last monday and nothing came from it. now whenever you start up it asks again to install windows xp.

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That doesn't sound good.
by MarkFlax Former Forum moderator Feb 16, 2009 5:06AM PST

I may be incorrect here, but that F10 option is one that appears on some systems during the boot up process, after the POST, (Power On, Self Test), and before Windows starts to load. Some systems have a hidden partition on the hard disk for Recovery. If this is accessed by pressing F10 during boot up, it will re-load Windows back to factory settings.

Everything is wiped clean from the main C drive and Windows is reloaded/reinstalled.

It doesn't seem from what you say if the install has gone ahead, but I am not sure how they can recover from this. That wording you quoted may be wrong. It may have said Press F10 for recovery, not Press F10 for restart.

Things to try;

1] Is there a CD in the CD drive? If so, the computer may be attempting to boot up from the CD and if that CD is the XP installation CD it may be trying to open the reinstall process. Remove the CD and see if bootup will continue.

2] After POST, start pressing the F8 key once a second. Usually this will bring up the Safe Mode set of options. If it does, try booting into Windows normally. If that fails, reboot to the Safe Mode options again and try the other options, eg Load Windows in Safe Mode, or "Last known good configuration".

But if the recovery process has gone too far, I fear all the files on that previous isntall have been lost.

Mark

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(NT) Yep, F10 On HP/Compaqs Usually Starts Reformat And Install
by Grif Thomas Former Forum moderator Feb 16, 2009 7:15AM PST
Back to Windows Legacy OS forum

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