Resetting BIOS (What happens?)

If BIOS is reset on a pc, will an already installed XP & already installed Drivers be reset too? My Master HDD is a SATA and for it I had to install a Driver from a floppy, will the driver be removed if I reset BIOS?

My problem is that I want to add a IDE HDD set as a Slave that I used on my last pc. It has a lot good files on it that I don't wanna lose. But when I hook it up I get a NTLDR Is Missing, and the pc wont load into XP. Someone suggested to reset BIOS to fix this problem.

 

An NTLDR missing error has nothing to do with your BIOS, it's a Winodws OS issue. Resetting BIOS merely means all its parameters are set back to defaults. Windows drivers are not stored within BIOS.

 

is your old hd from windows me/98? if so windows may be not identifying it because its a fat32 format instead of ntfs...

 

That could be the case, because previous to my current legal XP, I used a illegal version of XP, and before that a legal version of 98se. How can I get windows to identify the drive without deleting whats on the drive?

 

Thanks for the thorough explanation.

 

Too tired to type so I'm quoting someone elses work.

I hope that helps.

 

Not clear how the symptoms pan out.
Are you saying that the computer boots ok with winxp on SATA without the extra hard drive?
If so are you aware that to make a hard drive a slave you have to alter the jumpers. You may also have to enter setup (bios) and make some changes depending upon your motherboard. These would be obvious once in setup.
If you have connected a win98 hdd without changing jumpers to the IDE to a working SATA pc it would (wrongly) display the symptoms you describe because it is trying to boot from the IDE drive but looking for win XP.

Studio T

 

Thank you augiedoggie, I will try that.

 

When I boot up in BIOS it says NO MASTER IDE DETECTED...PRESS F1 to resume. Perhaps I hooked up the SATA master without changing the settings for it to not look for a IDE master. If thats the case, how could I change it to just look for a SATA master and also recognize a IDE slave?

 

WinXP shouldn't have any trouble dealing with a FAT32 drive. I'm running four FAT32 partitions on my system that are visible to both my operating systems. WinXP has no trouble dealing with any of them.

It's the FAT32 operating systems (Win98, etc.) that can't deal with NTFS.

 

Hey there. Maybe we need to take a step back here just to make sure we are on the same page. Correct me if I am wrong. You have properly jumpered your IDE drive (If it is the only drive on IDE channel then it can be jumpered as slave or master). Next you entered BIOS and set your SATA as the drive to boot from and enabled a slave drive on IDE. If you have done this, you shouldn't have a problem.

I get the impression you haven't yet gone into BIOS and made the correct changes. Usually to enter BIOS, upon boot up hold down F10 or DEL (depending on your system). If you are unsure, consult you mobo manual.

 

Moonsavior,
Several Geeks have tried to help you but you haven't answered their questions!
To set a few misconceptions straight.
1) Your bios reset has nothing to do with your stated aim. Do not reset it.

2) If you computer boots to XP from sata or anywhere else it will read win 98 formatted drives (and many others)

3.) A pc will try to boot preferentially from IDE, if present. Hence your symptoms.

4) To access your old IDE files, make the CD rom master and the IDE hard drive slave on an ide channel by setting the physical jumpers on the back of the drives.

Studio T

 

Unless you have 2 IDE channels, then you can put the HDD on the primary and the cd-rom on the secondary. I understand it is bad to have a HDD on the same channel as optical drives, correct me if I am wrong.

 

Does nobody ready anything properly these days?

Walter, as I undrstand matters,
Moonsavior wants to copy data from an old windows98 hard drive to his new windows xp system.
Unfortunately if he hooks it up as an ide master the bios tries to load windows 98 from it preferentially to windows xp which is on sata. This generates an error message because boot.ini is expecting to load from somewhere else.
Thus he can not have a hard drive, containing an operating system, as an ide master. Thus I suggested he hook up the drive as slave to his CDROM drive. This will not cause the system to try to load win98. The alternative is to somehow disable win 98 on the old hard drive. I realise this will cause the hard drive to run more slowly but this is of no matter if all you want to do is to copy some old files.
I am not sure if moonsavior understands about jumpers. There is one on the motherboard for resetting the bios to factory settings, he referred to this at the outset AND SHOULD NOT DO THIS or it will compromise the well working of his pc.
By the way you were wrong about saying it does not matter if the drive is slave or master. Connecting only a drive jumpered as slave to an IDE channel will cause an error in bios. As Moonsavior has SATA he probablyhas had to give up one IDE channel anyway.

Studio T

 

Ok. I thought he was merely trying to add the IDE as a secondary and the system was defaulting to the IDE as boot drive. Another alternative would be to just go in BIOS and set the boot drive as the SATA drive and that would eliminate booting from the IDE drive, regardless of jumper settings (slave or master). Then it would appear in Windows as the E: drive, most likely.

 

There's a couple of too-broad statements in the above that I think need addressing:

You'll also need to pay attention to the positions of the drives on the drive cable. Slave in the middle; master on the end. You may get away with ignoring that requirement on a 40-line IDE cable, but not with a 80-line ultra-ATA cable. Of course, the above comment is not relevant to a SATA drive.

There's nothing inherently harmful in putting IDE drives of different technologies on the same cable. walter34payton2002's observation assumes that most data transfers will be between the optical drive and the hard drive, but that assumption isn't necessarily correct. It's a performance issue only.

The two drives on the same IDE cable will be responding to the same controller. The result is that only one can be active at any given time, which slows down a transfer between those two drives. (It has notthing to do with the technology used by the drives concerned.) If two drives are on different IDE channels, one can be reading while the other is writing. That really speeds up a data transfer between the drives concerned.

There is also the issue that the two drives on the cable will tend to work at the speed of the slower one -- particularly if it is the master. Optical drives usually work at lower data transfer modes than hard drives. Short answer: walter34payton2002's observation is usually correct -- but not always. If maximum performance is a concern, pay attention to how the data moves between drives in the usage you give your computer. For instance: if you're copying a lot of CDs or DVDs using two high-performance optical drives (one as source, one as destination) consider putting them on different IDE channels.

 

As many have found out and these forums bear witness, it is all to easy to loose contact with one's operating system and thus control of the pc by a mis-setting with SATA. Unfortunately not all boards behave exactly as their manuals would have us believe.

I have been trying to offer advice that would avoid this particular pitfall. A single wrong setting in bios or a total reset could easily achieve this undesirable effect.

I would be happy to discuss SATA lore v IDE lore in another thread, but not here.

Studio T

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