Motherboard BIOS keeps resetting itself. Only built this up yesterday, brand new Motherboard too, but if I leave it more than an hour or so, I get back to it and it won’t boot til I’ve been into the BIOS again to mess with the settings! Doesn’t do it if I just restart the OS.

Board is a Gigabyte G41M-ES2L if that makes any difference. I bought the board brand new and unused, but suppose it could well have been sat on a shelf for a good while, so is it possibly the CMOS battery? Or should that be fine still, even without use, after a couple of years on a shelf?

May as well change the battery. If your watch battery failed after two years, you’d not complain.

Yeah, but it’s a brand new mobo… Well, it hadn’t been used before anyway…

Though you do have a point, may as well change it anyway…

Is there a jumper on the CLR_CMOS pins near the battery?

Definitely sounds like a CMOS battery, can’t think of anything else apart from a BIOS reset jumper?

is it getting hot? Sounds more like it’s overheating to me.

Is what I thought too Samuri, but don’t see how it can be getting hot… There’s enough cooling in there to keep your beers cold! I made sure of that building it up…

Is there a jumper on the CLR_CMOS pins near the battery?

Don’t know, will have a look, silly question but what difference would it make?

And if it is getting hot, and I don’t know about it (CPU seems to get no higher than about 34 degrees incidentally, it has got a MAHOOSIVE cooler on it), how the hell is that happening?

Just gonna power down now, have a look at it, then power back up so be back in 5…

CLR_CMOS is used to wipe the bios settings so if the jumper or switch is set to it then it will just keep clearing your bios when you turn the pc off.

Heat isn’t going to reset your bios settings (unless you set it on fire, then it will 🙂 )
Check there’s no jumper on those pins.

That’s a photo of the CMOS battery and the surrounding area, what am I looking for?

Just tested everything for heat, to be honest, RAM is getting pretty warm, the GFX card (an 8800GTS is warm to touch for certain), but everything else is very cold. May move one of the 3 120mm case fans now I’ve found out there’s very little air flow from it where it’s firing, so may stick it in the top of the case venting upwards. But it’s not hot inside there for sure.

This is the screen I get… EVERY time I reboot now!

What’s causing it?

A better photo of the same…

To be fair, that silver heatsink with Gigabyte written on it (don’t know what it is, not that technical) gets bloody hot!

Don’t worry people, took a couple of hours, but google and some internet forum research led me to understand it’s nothing to do with my motherboard, but all to do with the software installed on it.

Downloaded the right patch, and it seems to be all sorted now… Fingers crossed!

What exactly is the problem and what patch did you use? I need to know because I could face the same problem if I hackintosh it. Off to bed now …

chewkw, just downloaded the CMOS reset fix kext and installed it with Kext Utility…

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=259366&st=0&p=1698000&#entry1698000

Seems to have worked fine.

Ah, Hackintosh.

My understanding of this is that the BIOS ACPI reports its capabilities to the OS, but OSX can only understand what it expects to be coming from a supported Apple board. So, you need to either patch the firmware to pretend to be a Mac, or patch the OS to ignore what it doesn’t understand.

What you’re doing with the Kext is the latter – you’re basically adding drivers to OSX to support the PC hardware. This strikes me as a far more sensible (and safer) approach than buggering about with your BIOS and a hex editor.

If you’re hackintoshing, avoid using any (non standard apple) kexts at all, and get your DSDT correct. Then you avoid all these problems, and can upgrade OS versions fine. As far as the OS is concerned, it *is* a mac.

I have a DSDT for g31 but it’ll be no good for your 41. Check on insanelymac, there’s plenty info there.

This is the first option Cougar suggests, it effectively reconfigures the bios on boot so it interfaces the way OSX expects. It’s not required to “bugger about with a hex editor”. The mobos are designed to be reconfigured like this, indeed windows and linux do it behind the scenes.

The mobos are designed to be reconfigured like this, indeed windows and linux do it behind the scenes.

Not by flashing the firmware DSDT they don’t.

Other than that though, you’re right I think. You can provide a ‘soft’ DSDT and a quick google would imply that you can set the OSX boot loader to point to this rather than the BIOS-supplied table. I know next to nothing about the Mac side of things, but that sounds like it’s going to be a reasonable best-of-both-worlds approach.

I’ll bow to your superior knowledge though – I’m thinking out loud more than anything.

IA did you write the DSDT yourself? I’ve had a go with a DSDT editor, and was getting somewhere too (only like editing CSS really), but I couldn’t work out for the life of me how to install it, or fix the final couple of issues. CMOS reset was easy, but couldn’t work a couple out.

To be fair, I’ve run Tony Mac’s multibeast, and installed all the suggested kexts for my board now, but I think 10.6.7 and the firmware on my board revision were incompatible with the CMOS. So installed another kext to deal with it. It’s all trial and error, but I’m learning a hell of a lot!