Capturing Error Messages During Boot Cycle

Many years ago while still building PC's, I chanced upon a neat batch file which was energized by Autoexec.bat during start-up.

The batch file would instruct the system to capture all the messages to the screen and write them to an ASCII file wherever directed. Typically to a floppy.

The justification for this little tool was to facilitate diagnostics by allowing the tech to read the file and see every sequence in the boot cycle, including the error messages that typically flash by so fast as to be useless.

I just lost a lot of time trying to get my SCSI based P4 system working after a failure of the power supply. What should have taken no more than 30 minutes ate up the entire afternoon as I tried to track down what was going on. By a lengthy process of elimination, I finally changed the CMOS battery.

Only after I tested the old one did I see why my efforts to configure the boot sequence were compromised.

The system was writing the boot sequence info to Setup but was loosing it during the reboot by low voltage.

Typically a low voltage alert in the CMOS battery is written to a file somewhere, if you configure the system to save the error flags.

However, what does one do when you can't get to the Setup?

Does anyone here know of a utility that I can install that does what that old batch file did 20 years ago? The one I referred to was not that big as I recall: perhaps 8 lines of code and, as I remember, wasn't even in Basic, just a text file.

Thanks

L.J.