Re: Off topic - BIOS problems?

[Neal Birch <nealbirch mediaone net>]

Pete Robie wrote:
> 
> I bought a machine from a friend that is a Asus motherboard
> with an AMI bios. The problem that I am having is that 90%
> of the time, I get 'HDD: Device not ready.' and I assume
> that this is a bios problem. If I do a soft boot then the
> machine boots normally, however, it takes quite a bit of time
> (about 1 min) to locate the drive. I have looked at Asus's site 
> and tried to get the flash live update, but it doesn't find the
> correct motherboard.

Which motherboard? what kind of hard drive? On my hard drive, i
have a jumper setting for stand alone, master and slave, if I
select master instead of standalone (my bad, i had been using it
as a master on a different machine and didn't check the
settings), I have the same problem. I have a K7M, though. I did
have another problem like that which was due to a pnp isa card,
which the bios would assign an address to that which conflicted
with the address that the agp controller wanted or that the ide
controller wanted (these were loaded later in the startup,
apparently)ie it would work fine when the isa card wasn't in the
slot. I traded the pnp card off to my step son for one with
jumpers for port and irq settings, but never installed it because
we got the cable modem that week.

I would check the jumper settings on the HD first, pull out any
cards that are not necessary to boot up and try again. if it
works without the cards installed, then add them one by one, see
when (or if) the problem recurs.

-- 

neal birch 
- who is not case sensitive.