Itβs possible they had a dead BIOS battery, and whenever they had to boot up, they had to reset the BIOS clock, or the system would go haywire thinking it was Jan 1, 1992 or whatever the default date was.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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That is the answer.
Some boards will prompt you to press the key to enter the BIOS as the only option when the CMOS battery is flat. Whether or not you set the clock, you still have to enter the bios to boot.
The battery is a standard CR2032, so it's easy to replace, but it's not something that most people experience, so it's not common knowledge.
Personally I went about 6 months doing the same thing before I even bothered googling "how much does a CMOS battery cost" because it was an old pc anyway.
Some boards position their battery in really awkward and annoying places that force you to remove components to get to it. A real pain... don't make me remove the CPU cooler just to get to the battery... >.>'
Dell seem to be the worst at it. You cannot access any component without removing every other component.
I seem to remember at one point I had a computer where you couldn't easily access the RAM unless you removed the graphics card. Because one of the RAM clips couldn't be undone because it literally hit the graphics card.
When companies go out of their way to make designs that are as obtuse as possible just for the sake of doing so, it's especially aggravating. Like pre-built PCs that solder their components on or disable elements so that you can't upgrade them.
My assumption is that the default boot device was wrong and they needed to go to the bios to switch it but would never save the correct order so they had to do it every time.
Not sure! However, it's possible the coin cell that keeps the BIOS settings was removed or dead. This forces the BIOS into default configuration on boot, which may have caused a boot failure if you needed some specific hardware configuration set in BIOS.
Maybe they used it as a way to control computer access, but it seems more likely that they just didn't get around to replacing the coin cell :D
They had some BIOS issue or wanted to boot from a different partition. Possibly to keep your virus laden downloads away from their files.
"Let us just change the boot order so you can play in your shitty OS, and not our secure Gentoo drive"
Are you sure it was BIOS, and not just the password unlock, or they had DOS amd Windows Dual boot?
It was possible to set a bios password. They might have done that to prevent you from booting the computer without permission.
Bios was not set up correctly, or it did not detect the keyboard and was set to fail into bios in that case.
There was no real standard of behaviour that was adhered to for early PCs, so different hardware acted very differently. Standards that were adopted like USB were often implemented in incomplete or incompatible ways.
Your parents werent computer smart people.
Hey, knowing your way into the BIOS and out again is at least hacker level 7.
I mean the computer literally tells you how to do it when booting up
Reading the messages on the screen is already hacker level 5.