[Westy]

Rebooted my home PC yesterday and during power up instead of the BIOS loading screen it displayed a message that it was reloading Bios from the HDD. I let it sit for a solid 8 hours with no changes. Cycled power and now absolutely nothing happens on power up. I figure the BIOS is toasted or the MoBo itself. If it is just the BIOS is there anyway to reload it? It is non socketed but the OEM has to load the BIOS somehow.

 

[ghostrider]

What motherboard we talkin? Who makes the BIOS?

 

[Westy]

Screw it. Just ordered a new mother board.

 

[ghostrider]

Wuss.

 

[binary visions]

You could have saved yourself the $$. There are usually a set of jumpers on the motherboard that will allow you to reset the BIOS.

Enjoy your new motherboard, though

 

[Westy]

You could have saved yourself the $$. There are usually a set of jumpers on the motherboard that will allow you to reset the BIOS.

Enjoy your new motherboard, though

Manual made no mention of a way to reset BIOS. I can clear the CMOS by pulling the battery. That will only clear BIOS settings right?

 

[H8R]

Manual made no mention of a way to reset BIOS. I can clear the CMOS by pulling the battery. That will only clear BIOS settings right?

On most mobos there is a jumper (usually near the battery) that you move one place, reboot, then put back.

 

[D_D]

Manual made no mention of a way to reset BIOS. I can clear the CMOS by pulling the battery. That will only clear BIOS settings right?

Yes pulling the battery will work but it will just clear the settings which I really doubt is your problem.

IIRC most modern bios have a built in failsafe which is probably what you are seeing. It's basically just a striped down version of the bios that will read a bios image off the disk and flash it if there is a problem running the full bios.
It's mostly so you can recover from failed attempts to flash the bios with a newer version. Since you where not doing that I suspect the problem is more serious. Might be worth getting looking for a bios image on the manufactures site and sticking it on the hard drive.

 

[binary visions]

IIRC most modern bios have a built in failsafe which is probably what you are seeing.

Cycled power and now absolutely nothing happens on power up.

He probably can't even get the BIOS to load a new image.

Clearing the CMOS will fix a suprising number of problems, sometimes the BIOS settings get so scrambled it won't even boot.

If that doesn't work, though, the problem may very well be deeper than even a toasted BIOS. For the price of a new motherboard, I wouldn't worry too much about fixing this old one.

 

[Westy]

Clearing CMOS did nothing. The MB manual had no reference to a BIOS jumper. So I did the next best thing and found the one undocumented jumper, tried it with no results. $80 replacement is already on its way.

 

[Westy]

Got the new board. Computer now starts to boot. Of course Win2000 doesn't like the hardware change so I'll probably have to do a fresh install. Thinking about going to XP but actually buying an OS is a foreign concept for me.

 

[binary visions]

Got the new board. Computer now starts to boot. Of course Win2000 doesn't like the hardware change so I'll probably have to do a fresh install. Thinking about going to XP but actually buying an OS is a foreign concept for me.

Windows hates massive hardware changes like that. You probably won't have a stable OS until you do a reinstall. I mean, you just changed the chipset drivers, IDE drivers, USB drivers, and possibly firewire, sound, and video drivers (if they're onboard) all in one shot.

XP Professional is a good OS. If you want to.. uh.. yarr, matey..., you can PM me. Otherwise, it's not that expensive

 

[H8R]

XP Professional is a good OS.

XP home is asstastic. Avoid it like it was a woman with a knife.

 

[Ciaran]

Got the new board. Computer now starts to boot. Of course Win2000 doesn't like the hardware change so I'll probably have to do a fresh install. Thinking about going to XP but actually buying an OS is a foreign concept for me.

PM me your address, I'll send you a mostly legit copy for free.

 

[Transcend]

Normally JUST Pulling the batteries won't do anything. You need to use the jumper in combination with the battery being pulled...

 

[binary visions]

Normally JUST Pulling the batteries won't do anything. You need to use the jumper in combination with the battery being pulled...

On all of the motherboards I've ever used (and that's a lot), pulling the battery kills all the settings and resets to default (which is the same thing the jumper does).

The battery is what maintains the settings and the system clock. Why wouldn't pulling it cause a reset?

 

[Wumpus]

I've reloaded the bios on one after I stupidly plugged in a HD with the power on. I was delirious at the time from reinstalling everything.

The last MB I had said you had to send it back to the manufacture to reflash. Same company, go figure.

 

[Transcend]

On all of the motherboards I've ever used (and that's a lot), pulling the battery kills all the settings and resets to default (which is the same thing the jumper does).

The battery is what maintains the settings and the system clock. Why wouldn't pulling it cause a reset?

Duh - I was thinking backwards. If you just jump it you still end up having to pull th ebatt. not the other way around.

Although, on some mobos, if the PSU is still plugged in, it will trickle charge it. So pulling the batt often won't do it on it's own. On one older overclocker type board I had (cant remember model...had raid before raid was cool) this was a "feature".

 

[Pau11y]

Normally JUST Pulling the batteries won't do anything. You need to use the jumper in combination with the battery being pulled...

No, not true. You'll need to unplug the power and then the battery pull will go. That EPROM needs power to retain. When power is gone, the EPROM wil go back to the burn'd in image. You can confirm this by the system clock when you get into BIOS after a battery pull w/o power plugged in.

Edit: oops... sorry, I was stuck on the last page...my bad

 

[Westy]

Another question here folks. Since the new mother board isn't recognized by my old OS I installed XP on a small spare HDD I have laying around. The plan was to back up all the data on the old drive then nuke it and reinstoll the OS on the original drive. Now here is my problem:

XP recognizes the old drive, kind of. It is an 80 Gb Hdd with two 40 Gb partitions. Xp is only recognizing the first of the two partitions. If I try to open the second partition of the drive XP gives me an "E:\ is not accessible. Access is denied" message.

If I look at the Disk Management screen under the Computer Manager the E: drive is listed as healthy but not Active. If I right click on the drive it will not give me the option to activate the drive.

Any ideas on how to activate this puppy? I was thinking maybe the directory information got corrupted and was going to try to download some disk recovery software. Any recomendations there?

 

[Transcend]

Did you format the second partition? Disk management may help you out here. You may also wanna try fixing the MBR, that may help if it's simple directory stuff.

 

[Westy]

Did you format the second partition? Disk management may help you out here. You may also wanna try fixing the MBR, that may help if it's simple directory stuff.

Haven't tried formatting it yet. There is some data on there that I do not have backed up that I would like to recover.

What is MBR?

 

[Pau11y]

MBR == Master Boot Record, the first (what was it...) 512kb of a hard disk that tells the OS what kind of file system it is and where all the tags are...? Anyway, don't format if you hope to recover. Well, actually, it doesn't really matter unless you do a low-level format. Here's what you can do:
In your disk management, make sure you have permissions set correctly. I ran into this before. As admin, I had set password for a partition and then I nuked my OS. Well, the permissions are tied to the SID and when I brought the OS back, the SID had changed. Even using admin, I still wasn't able to get to the contents of the drive. So, as admin, I had to go nuke the old admin's profile off the partition and then put my new admin profile onto it. Actually, you might need to add to the access profile before you nuke the old...it was a while ago.
Now, if this isn't the case, get yourself a copy of RunTime's Get Data Back for NTFS...GREAT proggie, saved my ass lots of times. Run a recovery. For a 40 GB partition, it'll take like 12 hours. It goes down to the hex level of the hdd and reads what data is lift on the drive. Since you haven't touched it, it should come out completely clean, baring any physical hdd corruption. The only thing is RunTime's Get Data Back is hard to get a hold of. I'd try torrent first. If it doesn't go, PM me and I'll see what I can do...yeee arrrr

 

[Transcend]

Ya the MBR basically is an index for the drive, in simple terms. You can format JUST the MBR. format /mbr i think is the command. This can fix all sorts of nonsense errors.

 

[binary visions]

The partition does not need to be active. Only OS/boot partition is marked as active. See attachment for an example - the menu shows that the partition is not marked as active.

It could be the MBR as suggested - format /mbr will just wipe the current MBR and it will fix itself. It's a beautiful thing and will only take five seconds.

The other thing I've run into some interesting problems with, is some drives end up with a conflict of drive letters. Try just pulling the cables for any of your CD drives or other drives you may have. Boot and see if it lets you into your drive - I've had two hard drives in the past that came from other computers and wouldn't show up as anything but their specified drive letter.

Past that, good luck with your data recovery

 

[splat]

You Now , they Just released Red hat Fedora 5, seams like now would be a good time to Upgrade!


on the unreadable Partition. Download the ISO for Knoppix and burn it , it is a Full linux OS that is can be run from the CDROM , it can read Most NTFS partitions and help you get the data you need off of the partition . ( and I'm not just saying this to tout Linux , it is a good tool, it has saved a lot of peoples hard work around here. )

 

[Westy]

Thanks for all the help everyone, y'all rock.

Here is where I am at. I tried the trial version of Get Data Back software Pau11y recommended. It found all the files on the drive but the trial version does not let me do mass file moves, I have to purchase it for $79 or open and save as 12Gb worth of files. I may try to find a cheaper data recovery package. Before I do that I will try the fdisk /mbr. A little googling shows that should be a very safe option.

If that does not work I will try to rearrange the drives so it goes back to the original drive letter. This may require me to reload my OS onto the first drive partition but I'll try just juggling drive letters in the Disk Manager first.

Splat, I can't really try the redhat at this point as my network connection at home stinks right now and downloading large files is not an option.

 

[Pau11y]

Thanks for all the help everyone, y'all rock.

Here is where I am at. I tried the trial version of Get Data Back software Pau11y recommended. It found all the files on the drive but the trial version does not let me do mass file moves, I have to purchase it for $79 or open and save as 12Gb worth of files.

Check your PM

Edit: one of the responses I posted to Westi:

You'd prob want to keep that proggie around in your Warez folder. It's one of those tools you don't use very often. But man when you need it, you just can't do w/o it.
I've used it to recover files from a server that ran a 320 room hotel, my homeworks, movies, music... I've also slapped other pplz HDDs into my system and got critical data off of it for them when their OS was hosed. So many ppl depend on Quickbooks and don't understand how important backup and redundancy is...
Anyway, just keep in mind that if you suspect a prob, shut that drive down. The more you write to it, the less you'll be able to recover. Low level tools rule!