[NinjaKitten]

As an actual EE who has designed mainboards, this smells of hyperbole to the N-th degree with a dose of misinformed. As another user said, you had a bunch of dead unmonitored CMOS cells, then lost power. Then realized that all your BIOS configuration parameters where lost and systems wouldn't boot from disk, likely because whatever chosen disk / raid controller configuration was wrong too then. We test mainboards to destruction with simulated faulty power supplies. The CMOS coin cell is so far down the failure chain, your mainboard has released the magic smoke several times over before the CMOS cell on the 3.3V rail with multiple protections is a single failure. I have exploded and burned CMOS coin cells before, but not before the board was a wreck. I'm talking catastrophic failure that it's a bigger concern to the system operators health, forget the board.

[latchkey]

Wouldn't the normal course of action to start with asking which board I'm running? Certainly not all mobos are created equal.