:'(

It was working earlier today, and seemingly turned off normally.

It powers on (the power button lights up), but screens stay off, no fans start, no BIOS beeps.

There's a sound I think is the hard-drive spinning up, I can open the CD/DVD tray via the button, and USB peripherals have power.

A search suggests it might be a dead CMOS battery... ok, I have spare a CR2032, I can open it up and swap that out and hope it works and continue on with life...

So I open the main case section thinking I've seen it before except it's no where to be seen.

Maybe it's under one of the fans or hard drives... so I download the service manual to avoid removing them all and... where the hell is the CMOS battery!?

After not finding any circles in the mainboard overview photos, I eventually find on page 52 a parts list and I see something about the right size/shape , number 26 that might say "BAT. 20MM 3V 210MAH W/CABLE 56MM CR2032C1-LF-MITSUBISHI 6-23-22015-P2C"

So I search "6-23-22015-P2C" and find what appears to be a $40 CR2032 battery wrapped in plastic with a special connector. Fuck!

So much for a few minutes and back to normal. :'(

Oh and of course it seems to be at a super inaccessible area that will require me to fully dismantle everything to get to. :'(

And the above link is for a US store - I can't find any UK results. FFS! :'(

Can anyone confirm how likely the problem is to be the CMOS battery, or something worse, and if I can somehow unwrap the plastic and replace it, or else find something that isn't a 6-23-22015-P2C but is definitely compatible with a Clevo D900F, or ...?

:'(

My understanding was that if CMOS was dead, so long as the PC could boot with default BIOS settings, it'd boot. But googling around suggests that's not always the case.

If it's just a plastic-wrapped CR2032, which it probably is, you can definitely get them cheaper. A quick search on Amazon shows them for about 4 quid each (or 10 for 8 quid!). On Ebay they're a couple of quid. (just search "CR2032 with wire").

They're offered in both polarities so, so long as you check that, they should be fine.

As to whether it is actually the CMOS battery... it's always hard to tell, innit, when the thing's just not booting. Worth a pop though!

That's so annoying and you have my sympathy, if not much else. Could be the battery I suppose. It could also be the graphics card, or a fault on the motherboard, or the RAM, or a drive error, or just about anything. 

Personally, I would suspect a drive error ahead of the motherboard and then the other components. Considering the amount of standardisation in a computer, you'd think they'd behave in the same way with similar faults, but it isn't the case. Some will boot to the BIOS in spite of major hardware issues. Others will just dumbly sit there because of a bit of hard disk damage.

I assume you've done the reseating dance, pulling out and reseating every connector, SATA cable, RAM card etc. Heat and vibration can loosen connectors over time, or so they say. Might be worth disconnecting the drive(s) to see if you can get to the BIOS. Also worth trying different combinations of RAM, say if you have two modules, try one then the other in the same slot.

It may also be a power-supply issue even if the peripherals appear to work. I've had the situation where the PSU supplies enough to power some of the rails, but not, say the CPU and/or GPU. Then, things like fans spin up, but nothing much else.

Thanks.

> My understanding was that if CMOS was dead, so long as the PC could boot with default BIOS settings, it'd boot.

That was mine too, but I found enough results to suggest it was worth swapping the battery, and I thought it was a simple task.

Given I haven't changed the battery before, it's at least 15 years old - well past the 10 year lifespan on the pack of CR2032s I have.

Although I might have read that it was removal of the battery to reset a corrupted BIOS which was the solution, in which case merely disconnecting then reconnecting might be enough - though even if that works a spare seems a good idea.

--

> I assume you've done the reseating dance, pulling out and reseating every connector, SATA cable, RAM card etc.

It's a large notebook form factor and I have limited space, so that's a complicated dance, and not one I was willing to even contemplate last night.

It's not the hard-drives: they all work fine in an external dock, and it doesn't boot with them removed.

I'll start removing/reseating other bits after I've had some lunch, and see if that reveals any further clues.

There's three RAM chips, all in awkward many-screwed places, but a single bad chip would be 12->8 which would be annoying but probably not a disaster.

If it's graphics card, they seems to be in region of £100..200 on Ebay - and hopefully, if it is that, I can find a compatible replacement and it doesn't trigger the Windows Activation bollocks... :/

Does it do BIOS beep codes? You didn't mention whether it beeped when you started it.

I found this https://www.manualslib.com/manual/773871/Clevo-3220.html?page=72

There are no beeps at all.

Since removing the optical drive there is no discernible noise.

That's the service manual for a Clevo 3220, which is an unrelated model.

Neither the Clevo D900F Service Manual nor Clevo D900F User's Manual mention beep codes - the latter does reference a "Power On Boot Beep" option in the BIOS, which is either off or not occurring (I think it normally beeps, but I'm not certain - it's usually the whir of the fans I listen for).

So far I've removed the optical drive, keyboard and RAM chip under the keyboard, with no differences (other than the drive not whirring).

Currently trying to figure out how to get at the part where the CMOS battery connects.

Found a motherboard removal guide for the D900C - looks similar enough, but also seems to require removing every screw. :(

The number of screws in things these days. And the screws they put under stickers/rubber feet etc..

And when you've taken all the screws out you have to unclip all the fragile plastic clips with a spudger to the point where it feels like it's going to break. Or you unclip one side and the other side re-clips.

It's all so fucking hostile to maintenance/repair.

My desktop PC finally gave up the ghost so I replaced it one of these and I've been very impressed with it. For something so compact it's *really* easy to get into. They even have a disassembly guide on their own Youtube channel, which is lovely.

(it's running arch btw)

 

The frustrating thing is I've been working on what will be the replacement for the broken machine, but it's still in the process of being setup.

Was hoping to spend January making it sufficiently usable, so I can relegate the last Windows machine to graphics and music (since there are still no good Linux equivalents to Cinema 4D, Lightroom, Music Bee, Paint Shop Pro.)

Except I also have a bunch of other tasks that needed doing ASAP, and now this is yet another blocker on top of the stack.

If I can't make progress in figuring it out today, I'll have to accelerate work on the replacement, transfer the Windows stuff to a VM, and hope I can get everything important going quickly enough without making compromises. (Like why the fuck does a PDF viewer have PulseAudio as a dependency. :@)

> Like why the fuck does a PDF viewer have PulseAudio as a dependency

Hahaha. Which one?

 

Okular.

It's not a direct depends - comes via phonon4qt5 - "a task-oriented abstraction layer for capturing, mixing, processing, and playing audio and video content."

Since Okular doesn't support any audio or video formats, I don't know why it thinks it needs that, and haven't yet checked if there's a compile option to ignore it.

Does it ... plug into notification systems or something? Cos yeah that's weird.

As far as I know phonon's *only* for A/V stuff.

FWIW I use mupdf and it's great (for my needs of: being able to read a pdf when I'm forced to deal with one)

Apparently there's a video widget in there. Why? Who knows...

Main problem with Mupdf is the lack of table of contents.

So after hours of screwing and prying I managed to gain access to where the CMOS battery is - removed it and tried to boot, no change, restored it, no change.

So either the battery is dead, or it's the graphics card that died, or something else.

Or I undid a vital wire/ribbon that I forgot about and didn't reconnect.

Ahh, for all those video-pdfs.

(hug)

I've searched all over hells half-acre for a good Linux pdf viewer. Best I came up with so far is Foxit, which isn't open source and (AFAIK), removed their Linux binaries quite recently. I run it in Fedora 40 (buggy) and also Win 10, though Adobe reader is slightly better on that.

Dunno about the video player stuff.

I stopped using Foxit on Windows when they started included adverts. Switched to Mupdf-based Sumatra PDF, which was lightweight and did everything I needed, but is Windows only.

The poorly named qpdfview has fewer dependencies than Okular (is only Qt instead of KDE), but depends on Cups, which I'll need to recompile to remove Avahi crap.

Now they (Foxit and Acrobat) have AI junk shoehorned into the interface.

Please elect me leader of the world so I can bestow well-deserved punishments on every arsehole involved in all this so-called "AI" crap. :@