PC Startup Issues, possible double-booting

Bios time is needed to set parameters to the hardware clock, which is amongst many things primarily a hardware watchdog. Everything runs from the hardware clock and it synchronizes the hardware to a time sequence.

The windows clock works in a similar way outside of telling the time to the user many things use the clock in the same way but its for software.
There is a somewhat parallel between both but neither are inherently reliant on each other. They are both critically opposed as in they both are self critical to the areas they need to be.

Change the battery its only a few dollars and worth trying, it may not be the issue hard to say a tell tale sign of a cmoss battery going bad is bios will factory reset to defaults every time you turn the pc on. This will usually result in having to change your boot order at minimum and probably stuff like enabling AHCI every time you power on.

if you don't have to re apply settings each boot then the battery is still good, change it for peace of mind.

Yes the power on power off loop is a sign of the battery going bad. I just booted a computer today that is doing this. it keeps complaining about the time and sometimes i have to reset stuff other times is don't which means dead battery. I wont be using this pc forever so it can stay like that.

BJC1992 said:

So when I've replaced the battery would I need to only change the time on the Bios, and then see if everything else sorts itself out?

That's what I do. There's other settings that can be set by the User but generally the Defaults are sufficient.

always good to hear of another success..

My previous desktop PC had boot problems when the CMOS battery voltage dropped much below 3V yet the BIOS date was correct. Replace the CMOS battery which should be c. 3.2V open circuit for a new battery. Once the voltage of these batteries drops below 3V they can fail rapidly. Also connecting another drive having an active partition can cause such boot problems.