Well Shut My Mouth

Here's something I didn't know and it cost me a lot of time. And it might help some folks that do a restore and then can't get the sys drive to boot.

A floppy drive suddenly stopped working--didn't show up on My Computer anymore. So I disconnected it but forgot to tell the BIOS there was no floppy. When I tried to boot, "NO OS". What the . . .? So I whipped out ATI and did a restore. Tried to boot and still "NO OS".

Apparently whenever you unplug any drives it disturbs the Boot Priority order in the BIOS. Once I figured that out, I reset the order to boot off the intended sys drive (a RAID btw) and everything was fine -- except that darned floppy, but those are easily replaced for $5. Meanwhile, guess I'll leave it plugged in until I get a replacement.

 

It may only apply to floppy drives. I pulled one of my optical drives to make room for a hard drive caddy which holds my main HDD.
There were no subsequent boot problems. Next time I have the covers off I will try disconnecting the floppy drive to see what happens.

Xpilot

 

It must be hardware specific. I removed my floppy drive several weeks ago to make room for a card reader with no noticeable effect. It was third in the boot sequence.

CatFan

 

Something doesn't add up here. The boot priority is supposed to tell the system to look for a bootable device in a certain order. And it should go down the list until it finds a bootable device. I'm just surprised that it didn't ignore the missing floppy and go to the next device.

 

Windows goes down the list looking for an OS but the BIOS doesn't. Windows doens't see the floppy, when it boots it installs the driver (so it reports) but can't find the hardware.

With teh bad floppy drive hooked up, the BIOS reports a drive and windows tryies but can't find it, but everyting else works. With the drive disconnected and not BIOS changes made, the things seem to get a bit screwy. It could be just my mobo and it's BIOS or it could be a screwy IDE controllers, although both floppy and harddrive IDE controllers going bad at exactly the same time seems extraordiarily unlikely.

Thanks for the comments.

 

I just got done working on a Dell Dimension 2400 for a friend and had to do a full reinstallation. I was very frustrated at the bios and the over all hardware configuration of the machine. First of all, it would not boot off of the install cd and could not do so. I think it had to do with the bios only booting from devices on the master ide channel. Both CD's were on the secondary channel. The way the darn hard drive was mounted vertically against the front of the computer made it impossible to hook up any other way. I had to pull everything out use a different cable just to do the install.

Any way the part that related to this thread is the bios in this computer was stupid. When there was nothing connected to the slave channel with the bios set to Auto it would hang in the bios and complain there was no bootable device. If I disabled the primary slave channel in the bios everything worked fine. I never seen this before but clearly it was the crappy bios at fault. Auto means it adjusts automatically right!!!

 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at how user mean BIOS settings, BIOS documentation and just BIOS in general are. It's like it's written by programmers for programmers and everyone be damned. And the Help is worse "Change Dohicky changes the Dohicky setting. Nevermind what a Dohicky is or why anyone would want to change it; we aren't really sure ourselves."

The BIOS for my mobo was updated *25* times in about a year and a half. Good news is they kept fixing problems, bad news is that 25 times before the 26th edition, they missed problems. It's an AWARD bios, btw, not an uncommon one. The board is Abit. Btw, at 26 they had not perfected the BIOS but merely moved on to newer boards.

 

Unfortunately this is common in the computer industry. Not just BIOS but application software as well - sounds just like Acronis moving on to TI10 before the well defined reproducible problems were fixed in TI9.
Any lawyers out there looking for a class action?
Boy, would that shake up the computer industry!

 

Yea, but at least you can choose what applications you use. You're stuck with the bios and its updates on any given board. This is one of the reasons I never buy a computer from a manufacture like Dell or Compaq. I always build my own from user tested components that have been fully reviewed. It costs a little more but I am always much happier with what I am stuck with.

 

Me too. The one-size fits all approach for components which these companies use often means the machines are pretty lame in one area or another. Not to mention the fact that the motherboards are rarely ones you can use to upgrade your processor - if you are so inclined to want to.

They do have their place, if you don't want to do anything too intensive they are good value. Just not for me.

F.