www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk

Came in and found my monitors had gone to sleep, moved the mouse, hit the keyboard, monitors wouldn't wake up.

Reset the machine

Goes through the initial start-up but then says something along the lines of

Please restart and select boot device.

Reset a few times and still the same

Go into bios settings to check boot list. 1st was floppy, 2nd is HD1.

Select HD1, reboot and still get the same message.

Now it sounds as if the HD is poggered but on initial start up checks it says HD 1 status as 'OK'

Of course I never made a boot disk and gods knows where the windows disk is! It's running Vista Ultimate (or should say it WAS running vista ultimate' )

Any help on next step guys?

Sussed it. Somehow without any input from me the bios settings where changed to boot up from my slave drive not my master.

How the hell can that happen???

Ghosts???

Look at date and time, is it correct?

BG

I noticed it was in the bios settings so don't think the CMOS was randomly reset if that's what you're thinking.

Strange

The bios will lose its settings if the battery on the M/board is over 2 years

Really? Because I've got about 9 machines here that say otherwise!

Well maybe its that the computers I've had to repair over the years have all been crap ones
but if your bios keeps losing its settings -well I would tend to think its time to change it

tombarry wrote:The bios will lose its settings if the battery on the M/board is over 2 years

Sorry, but I agree with BillyGoat.

Only ever had one bios battery fail, this PC for example must be 6 years old, still got the same bios battery. Other thing is, if it does loose the bios settings the clock (time) will default. There was no mention of that.

Whenever I have trouble booting my computer, I get angry, give it a good kicking, repeat and rinse, until it sees the error of it's ways and decides to boot properly (always works) (and don't get me started on road rage )

Pretty sure that's where the term 'booting' and the common phrase 'have you tried re-booting?' came from John ;)