bios forgets the master drive is there?

[mark]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

For the past few months I've had this problem, but since I leave the PC on
most of the time I never bothered to try to find out what would cause this:

every time I boot the PC up, it fails to detect the master hard drive
containing WinXP Home on it. The PC just hangs as it can't find an OS. The
only way to get it to boot up is to go into the BIOS and hit the autodetect
and it right away detects the master drive. I can then save the settings and
it boots up just fine. But if I restart the PC, it fails to recognize it
again.

My thoughts are:

1. battery going bad on the motherboard? I don't even know if there is a
battery on my motherboard but I assume there is one.

2. The hard drive is failing. But if that's the case, wouldn't it have gone
by now?

Any ideas?

--
mark
___________________
www.sixstringtheory.com

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

mark wrote:

> For the past few months I've had this problem, but since I leave the PC on
> most of the time I never bothered to try to find out what would cause this:
>
> every time I boot the PC up, it fails to detect the master hard drive
> containing WinXP Home on it. The PC just hangs as it can't find an OS. The
> only way to get it to boot up is to go into the BIOS and hit the autodetect
> and it right away detects the master drive. I can then save the settings and
> it boots up just fine. But if I restart the PC, it fails to recognize it
> again.

Fails to 'detect' it or there aren't any settings for it?

I mean, does the machine 'normally' redetect the drives on bootup of, as
you imply, depend on the settings arrived at during the BIOS set up?

If it's the later then your battery is probably low. TIME should be wrong
too, in that case, which you could use to verify the problem.

If it's supposed to be redetecting on each boot then look for a hard drive
start up (spin up) timer setting on the BIOS and give it a bit more delay.

>
> My thoughts are:
>
> 1. battery going bad on the motherboard? I don't even know if there is a
> battery on my motherboard but I assume there is one.
>
> 2. The hard drive is failing. But if that's the case, wouldn't it have gone
> by now?
>
> Any ideas?
>

 

[ken]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

mark wrote:

> For the past few months I've had this problem, but since I leave the PC on
> most of the time I never bothered to try to find out what would cause this:
>
> every time I boot the PC up, it fails to detect the master hard drive
> containing WinXP Home on it. The PC just hangs as it can't find an OS. The
> only way to get it to boot up is to go into the BIOS and hit the autodetect
> and it right away detects the master drive. I can then save the settings and
> it boots up just fine. But if I restart the PC, it fails to recognize it
> again.
>
> My thoughts are:
>
> 1. battery going bad on the motherboard? I don't even know if there is a
> battery on my motherboard but I assume there is one.
>
> 2. The hard drive is failing. But if that's the case, wouldn't it have gone
> by now?
>
> Any ideas?
>

As David said, if your RTC is OK, it is likely that your HD is not
getting up to speed fast enough. Additional time to detect the HD might
solve the problem, but it could also be an indication of impending HD
failure. I would copy my HD data if it were mine.