BIOS - is it always safe to restore factory defaults?

[marja]

Hi,

So far, I only restored factory defaults in a BIOS once. It worked miracles in a system that had become very unstable and crashed all the time, and where nothing else helped: after this reset, all problems were gone.

What I don't know is: is it always safe to try this, or are there exceptions?

Cheers,
Marja

[oj]

I've never had a problem after resetting. Besides, I always figured if some setting was incompatible with the OS I could always go into setup and change it back. It can't physically hurt the operating system on disk,

[filip]

Short answer: in my experience that was never unsafe. But! This can make device.map file obsolete. It might change IRQ numbers. It can disable some advanced functions and lower some speeds. This depends on the stored settings.

AFAIK most of that is not a problem for modern kernel these days. Boot issue remains but it can be solved.

And remember BIOS has many bugs and there is very little we can do about it.