re: can't enter bios
Friday, January 2, 2009 at 10:29 am
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Ed
(742 messages posted)
Happily, you were able to solve your particular problem (by building yourself a bootable
CD to use in your PC's CD-ROM drive).
However, you implied that the reason why you could not access the BIOS was that you
had removed the computer's hard drive. If you truly thought that, it's unclear why
you didn't solve your problem by simply re-attaching the hard drive.
However, removing the hard drive could not have caused that problem. A computer will
start up even with no hard drive present. For instance, it used to be common in the
old days to have computers that *only* had a floppy drive!
Also, when building a new system it is always necessary to enter the BIOS first,
to set up the system to recognise the hard disk which you are about to install.
The BIOS is entered by pressing the correct key(s) on the keyboard during the Power
Up Self-Test (POST), *before* any disks are accessed. No hard disk or floppy disk
is required to be attached.
The BIOS contains the stored settings which tell the computer what disks are on the
system. So (for example) when installing a new hard disk during system recovery the
first step is to press DEL - or whatever is the appropriate key - in order to enter
the BIOS screen, for the purpose of auto-detecting the new disk.
If not DEL, the key to press is always one of the function keys (F1 to F12), sometimes
in combination with the CTRL key or the ALT key.
Whatever other problems there may be, entering the BIOS during start-up does NOT
require a bootable disk (nor any disk) to be present on the system. It is therefore
straightforward to remove the old settings associated with the former (damaged) hard
disk, as a first step.
With a damaged system, it will often be the case that you will be installing a brand
new hard disk, not yet containing an operating system, one that will need partitioning
and formating before an O/S can be installed on it from a bootable Windows installation
CD or an OEM recovery CD.
The OEM system recovery CD supplied with most computers sold in the last 10 years
will handle those steps for you, from the CD drive, without needing to boot from
a floppy disk first. I actually have such an OEM recovery CD, supplied with my Win
ME computer 8 years ago, and once had to use it to re-install Win ME on a replacement
hard drive.
Ed
On Monday, December 1, 2008 at 2:16 pm, jombo wrote:
>ok i know this is an old post. i bought an old armada 7770dmt months back at a yard
>sale and was unable to access bios as i changed the hard drive. and it had only
a
>cd with no floppy. i was searchin high and low for help. this thread amused me.
the
>original question was never answered lol.
>
- Written in response to:
- re: can't enter bios (jombo: Monday, December 1, 2008 at 2:16 pm)
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 | | | | |  | |  | Linux (pieter: Wed, Apr 19, 2006, 1:21 am) |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | re: can't enter bios (Ed: Fri, Jan 2, 2009, 10:29 am) |
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