So I get this kooky bios screen on my old hack around pc that says the cmos battery is low. I change the battery and go about the process of reinstall but everything is wrong now. I go into bios and reconfigure the boot settings to be cd drive, hard drive, floppy and after a few retries the damn old thing starts reinstalling. I get to the reboot phase after windows loads and I am back to the same crappy bios screen minus the low battery message. Any suggestions?
I figured it out. Windows always asks for a reboot but then will say "press any key to boot from cd" This is said twice, once in the beginning which is necessary but the second time which is 1 hour later you should not press a key. I knew of this but because of cmos losing it's memory it changed the screen display and I'm not even certain at this point if I hit a key or not because I was multitasking at the time. Either way, the old dog pc rebooted like a faithful old mutt and is back in service. (once I reinstall a million drivers LOL)