I'd like to see that. (links?)
If your CMOS dies, that means your mobo won't post (and cannot even supply a clock for the CPU) and you aren't able to do anything at all unless you buy a new CMOS chip from the manufacturer or you hotflash it from an idtentical board...or buy a new motherboard.
It's not that the CMOS chip was dead, but the onboard battery that stores information for the CMOS/BIOS/POST was drained. I don't know about modern CMOS setups, but back in the Packard Bell heyday, the main problem with a dead CMOS battery was that your computer could not remember your hard drive specs. RAM and processor would still run, but the computer couldn't find a hard disk, and couldn't do anything. The key was to go into the BIOS and input the hard drive info by hand (number of sectors, cylinders, etc). It usually wasn't enough to boot Windows, but it would be good enough to get a DOS prompt and copy stuff to floppies.
