BIOS help needed...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rob
  • Start date Start date
R

Rob

Since I got fantastic help earlier this week from this
community newsgroup, I thought that I would try again. I
have a pretty long story, so here goes...

Sony RXA-842 (AMD 2400+ Athlon, 80G Samsung HD, Samsung
512MB PC-2100 DDR) crashed on shutdown Monday with a Page
fault in non-paged area (0x00000050 error). Computer
rebooted straight to the blue screen of death. Windows
support site gave error code that it was probably a faulty
RAM. Went out and bought two new Kingston 512MB PC2100 DDR
(they were on sale so why not two, but only one is in).
Start up again...blue screen of death. Safe mode, Last
known good config, even advanced setup of restoring
defaults...all blue screen of death. Tried Windows six 3
1/2 disk boot set and got an error in ntfs.sys file and
boot crashed each time. Final desperation...bought new
Maxtor 80G HD, installed it making it the primary drive
during setup, used my restore disks, computer booted up
perfectly. Shut it down, plugged in the old drive to see
if it would read it as the secondary and I got the error
to "Load system disks". Didn't know what it meant so I
rebooted and immediately got into the advanced setup to
see what was going on. After I had saved my advanced
setup with the Maxtor as the primary, somehow the BIOS
read the old Samsung as designated that as a primary
instead. Shut off computer, unplugged the old one,
restarted, shut down, restarted into advanced setup and
wow, the Maxtor is the designated primary. Shut it down,
plugged the old one back in again along with the Maxtor,
booted back into advanced setup and it read again the old
Samsung as the primary and it didn't give me a choice in
the matter, either.

Anyway that I can modify my BIOS to not read the Samsung
as the default any time it's connected, but rather the new
Maxtor? Thanks!

Rob
 
The old disk is jumpered as slave? with new as master?
The boot order is set correctly in the bios?
 
Try using FDISK (very carefully), run from a DOS boot floppy, to declare the
old disk as "inactive", meaning unbootable.
 
You know, there are moments in life when you feel that
you've made yourself the object of ridicule to the point
where the whole world is laughing at you. They may be
moments such as walking out of a bathroom into a crowded
public environment (i.e. airport) with toliet paper stuck
to your shoe, walking into a solid wall because you
were "checking out a hot babe", or even realizing that
you've been walking about all day with your fly unzipped.

Now, a tiny, tiny piece of plastic has turned this into
one of those episodes.

Thanks, DL. In my rush to fix this weeklong, $420 in
cost, and my lost data, I forgot about moving that tiny
piece of plastic to make my old drive the slave. Worked
like a charm.

Rob
 
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