Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with BIOS

H61 install hell!

lattiboy — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:37:31 -0800

Getting the dreaded "Required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" during Windows 7 install, but no drivers are working! I'm trying to install Windows 7 x64 on a Shuttle XH61V barebones system, when I boot into the Windows install after cliking "install now" I get the "Required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing". No problem, I've had this before! There is no optical drive installed on the system, so I'll just go get the RAID or Chipset drivers from the Shuttle website and load them at install!

NO DICE!

I've tried every available H61 driver I can find and none of them will take.

I've gone into the BIOS and changed all the SATA options too. Tried ACHI and IDE modes with the same result.

Any ideas before I throw these against a wall?

thanks!

"esc" & f2 aren't doing it

ryanshepard — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:47:31 -0800

Booting from a disc on a Toshiba Portege R935 - how? Restarting with "esc" and "f2" held down allow me to access to BIOS / boot options, but the disc in the drive isn't showing as one of them. What am I missing?

Which is the exact keyboard sequence to switch an Acer Aspire 5920G to boot from CD?

lion — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 08:31:27 -0800

Which is the exact keyboard-time sequence to switch an Acer Aspire 5920G to boot from CD instead of HDD? I need to be guided like a blind. Maybe it has been a random event, by the way after a Windows update the Acer Aspire 5920G laptop of my friend has lost its capability to display anything on screen, both on builtin screen and on external monitor from VGA.

In fact, there's no way to see anything of what's happening, because from the moment you turn it on to the when you turn it off, nothing is displayed. Bios loading and bootstrap included.

The last attempt that I would like to try before opening the case is to boot it with a Linux live CD, and replicate the exact same actions that I can do on another PC, in order to load a VNC server or something like that, etc.

So I need someone that can guide me as a blind, when I turn it on, to enter the bios menu and change the boot sequence, choosing CD as the first device wher to boot from.

I need something like this:

- turn it on;
- wait (?) seconds;
- press the (?) key quickly for (?) seconds;
- wait (?) seconds;
- press the (?) key;
- press the (?) key (?) times;
- ...

For this reply, you should obviously have access to an Acer Aspire 5920G laptop.

Laptop's screen is shattered, need BIOS menu tree

siddhartha_in_costume — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:58:24 -0800

I have an ASUS G60V laptop. My lcd screen is shattered, and now I need to use a repair CD. Laptop won't boot into external monitor in repair mode, so I can't see the screen. Any ASUS owners be willing to walk me through the BIOS menu steps to see if I can get my laptop to connect to the external? The exact specs for my laptop are at this newegg page.

I've spent the past two hours perusing BIOS menu screenshots online, trying to find a set that matches what I can see on my laptop screen. (Laptop's screen is 16 inches, and 14 inches of it is shattered. There's a vertical 1-2 inch sliver on the right where I can see the far edge of what should be on my display.) But I've had no luck finding a match. If a good samaritan could help me, I'd be SO grateful. I'm out of work, and can't afford a repair bill. Thanks!

My other options, by the way, for those who ask:
1) repair the screen. I can't afford to do this.
2) try to use a repair cd blindly, which scares me more than adjusting bios settings blindly. because I just bought this laptop, and hadn't gotten around to burning a cd like I should have.
3) use a linux bootable OS CD to recover my files, recover my files, wipe the hard drive somehow. which will be hours and hours of troubleshooting fun.

Thus, I'd rather try the BIOS attempt first.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.

BobbyVan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:57:06 -0800

My homebuilt, always-on HTPC has ground to a halt. It won't boot past the BIOS, which slowly - slowly - fills the screen like it's being downloaded by a very old dial-up modem. What's my "checklist" for zeroing in on the problem? First, a quick overview of my specs:

-Case/Power Supply: Micro-ATX Case w/ 300W power supply
-Processor: Intel Core i3-2100t (35W Sandy Bridge w/ Intel Graphics)
-Motherboard: ASRock Z68 PRO3-M LGA 1155 Intel Z68 Motherboard
4GB Memory (G.SKILL, 2 x 2GB)
-HD: OCZ Agility 2 90GB SATA II SSD
-Optical: LITE-ON Black 12X Blu-ray Burner
-Tuner: 2 K-World UB-435q USB tuner devices
-OS: Windows 7 64-bit, Home Premium

I've programmed the computer to reboot every morning around 5am. Yesterday morning I turned on the TV and saw that live television (via Windows Media Center) would hang after about a second of viewing. I navigated to the desktop and noticed that the Aero animations (opening & closing of Windows) were incredibly sluggish. I went to reboot the system and noticed that it would sit on the BIOS screen for a few minutes, then attempt to begin Windows, but nothing would happen. Perhaps if I wait long enough Windows will open again but I haven't had the patience to try that yet...

Possible causes: I thought through a few things I did right before this all happened, and can think of a couple.

1) I plugged a Fisher Price Cradle Swing into the same (quite loaded) outlet that is used to power the 50" plasma, computer, receiver and speakers. Perhaps the PSU isn't getting enough power to all the components? [As an aside, I've needed to unplug and re-plug the USB TV tuners quite a bit lately to keep the TV signal going.] If the power supply is faulty, do I need to buy some electrical gear to test it, or is there another way?

2) I use Boxee, and opened the Boxee Media Manager through the firewall so it would stream our iPad. I opened it for both Home/Private and Public, in case that matters (could a nasty virus have invited itself in?).

So to my question: how do I diagnose the problem? I made Live CD's for both Memtest and Inquisitor (both using Linux) but couldn't get past the BIOS (I waited for about 30 minutes for each).

So I suppose I should take apart the computer piece by piece and see if I can narrow it all down.... How do I do that without driving myself crazy? Is there a checklist or something? I'm somewhat of a newb at this (first homebuilt PC).

Thanks.

My Poor Laptop

chocolatemilkshakes — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:05:15 -0800

Is there a place I can take my laptop to get crisis bios recovery done to it in person, instead of sending it to the manufacturer and waiting forever? I have a Brand New laptop, the software from the manufacturer kept popping up telling me I needed to update the Bios. Huge mistake, when I did it got a verify error in the middle of the process and ruined my whole computer, it won't start anymore.

I have spent three days spinning my wheels trying to do a bios recovery on my own, reading every possible suggestion online. I really thought I could do it on my own but I am giving up.

Would a local computer repair shop, or electronics store or something be able to offer a Bios Flash Recovery process on location? I don't want to send the computer back and wait 2 weeks, with school and work I can't afford to. I tried chatting with someone from GeekSquad just now, and he didn't sound too optimistic.

Reading about the recovery process online it appears that there are tons of people who have been able to recover their own computers after a bios crash, so I've got to image there would be some kind of professionals who would be able to do the same thing for me.

Where can I get this done? And is this at all a risky thing to trust someone at a shop to fix for me? (Are they going to accidentally wipe my data or make the problem worse?)

Thanks MetaBuddies!

How to reset CMOS on a Samsung N150

KokuRyu — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:34:54 -0800

How to reset CMOS on a Samsung N150 netbook? My wife's Samsung N150 is not turning on (it's fully charged and plugged in, and there's a little green light that says so).

When I say it's not turning on, it's not turning on. I'm hoping it's just a BIOS update error, rather than a hard drive failure (it's a solid-state drive).

We bought the N150 about 18 months ago.

Before I buy her a new netbook, I'd like to try doing a hard-CMOS-reset. However, I can't quite figure out how to do this on her machine.

There is a how-to on the internet here (it's in Italian, but Chrome does an okay job of translating) about how to disassemble a Samsung N150, but I'm kind of at a loss as to which stage counts as the CMOS reset on the N150.

Anything I should pay attention to?

bootless toshiba

Obscure Reference — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:35:28 -0800

I'm trying to install an OS on a machine whose DVD drive won't work. I have an external (USB) DVD drive but no way to convince the machine to use it as a boot device (that I know of). The machine is a Toshiba Satellite A105 laptop. It's BIOS is ACPI 1.30.
Its 4 boot options are HDD FFD CD and LAN. HDD has no (working) OS.
CD drive (or more accurately, the controler on the motherboard) is broken. How can I get an OS on this machine?

Choices seem to be--get a different BIOS in there, (I've never done such a thing so this may not even be useful), do something with a USB memory stick or external drive, or somehow boot via ethernet (something else I've never done.)

Suggestions?

Corrupted BIOS Toshiba L305D

NotSoSiniSter — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:03:39 -0800

Fuck! I corrupted the BIOS on a Toshiba L305D trying to update it in windows 7 (which i later realized was an incredibly stupid idea). It was a laptop we fixed and we were getting ready to sell it on our floor. Boss wants me to come in Monday with a fix. There seems to be a way to fix it using crisis BIOS recovery. But I need a BIOS.rom file. HELP!!! So the more complete story is, my boss wanted me to update the BIOS because the computer would freeze when we pressed F2 trying to access the BIOS. He thought flashing the BIOS would fix it and told me to do it. So I went to Toshiba, and found the newest BIOS utility. It had an option to do it in windows, I went through windows to flash a BIOS on a dell laptop a few months back and it was fine. So I thought it would be fine. Shit freezes halfway though and he walks over, and the think is dead froze, mouse and everything, then the screen just goes black but the things still running. He forces it to turn off and the thing just boots to a black screen. Nothing. At first he was pretty ticked about me not using a CD to do it through DOS, later, he calmed down and took it with a "well, shit happens" kind of attitude. But I spent the next hour trying to fix it. I told him there was a way to do it I just need to find the right file. I told him I'll look all weekend for it. :/

I stumbled on this forum thread:

Now read it all the way through because the steps are critical.
I got a Toshiba Satellite A215 PSAFGU (S6814) And after shutting down from overheating during a flash from windows it didn't boot. Black screen and nothing more. Meanning my bios was corrupt
So after lots of trial and error, using an external usb floppy drive I managed to save my laptop.
Maybe people here describe how to do it, but they tell you to download the wrong crisis recovery files and once you try to use your ROM instead of the one on the disk, or try to replace phlash16.exe it just fails. Tried injecting but that didn't work.
Finally I found a good Phoenix crisis copy at : http://mods.myftp.org/Tools/CrisDisk_and_Pen_Drive_Recovery.rar
unrar and go to the directory, then unrar (you'll see it) CRISDISK.rar .
This copy of crisis with phflash16.exe (in the extracted directory) is a good version that can handle the newest versions of bios ROM.
Now copy your ROM file to the crisisdisk directory renaming the file to bios.wph and thus replacing the existing one.(i used the new 2.0 version ROM from the Toshiba site - in this case its called m10a200.rom)
To prevent 'dos path' errors when building the disk, copy the entire directory to a simple one like c:\cirsis
Build your disk now by running CRISDISK.BAT - the process includes quick formatting, copying the three files, and lastly making it bootable, make sure you go through all the steps. ( at first, i messed the last part by not having it bootable and it failed ofcourse)
once it says it created the disk successfully, put it in your external usb drive (or use the disk you created to make a bootable flash drive by using hp drivekey boot utility available here: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839 I didn't have a chance to test it with usb flash drives, but it should work.)
Now once you connected your media to the usb port on your laptop:
make sure the battery is out, power cord out, hold fn+f, while doing that, plug the cord and then push the power button, release the fn+f key once you see the light on your usb drive/usb floppy is starting to blink. it should pause for a few seconds, and then start reading the disk for a while (not just 3 seconds). Process should not take more then 10 minutes so waiting more then that is a waste(trust me). The computer should reboot byitself if everything is fine. Mine took about 5 minutes but give it 10 just to make sure.
After hours of finding, replacing, injecting, only this worked.
This works for sure, if you follow these instructions with your Toshiba Satellite A215. Don't loose hope - you will recover it.
A good sign is when using the fn+f method and it flashed the usb drive/floppy. It means its 99% recoverable.

So, to a techy, its strait forward enough. He said that if the USB starts flashing when you turn the computer on, chances are the computer its "99% recoverable" So thats what I'm clinging to right now. What I'm having a difficulty doing is locating a .rom BIOS that I can use. The exact model number of the laptop is L305D-S5934. I've looked everywhere for a .rom of the bios. I can't find it. I'm going to be looking like all night, but if i can't find it, this is where i need someones helping hand.

This Utility will backup a BIOS in the .rom flavor. If someone out there has a Toshiba L305D, If you could run this and give me a backup of your rom, It would mean the world to me. :D

According to the forum post above, injecting a BIOS simply doesn't work with Toshiba. The Crisis thing seems to work, but if you have another method you want to share with me, that would be great.

Metafilter, help me! :D

Laptop goes black after BIOS. Was working minutes ago. What happened?

parkbench — Wed, 18 May 2011 14:26:42 -0800

Was fiddling with the eject settings on my laptop (didn't solve my problem, cd is still stuck in the drive no matter what i do), when I decided to reboot out of ubuntu and disable the drive altogether in the BIOS. Now almost as soon as the BIOS appear, everything goes black, though the computer is still clearly on. Help! I figured this way I could really control test it, see how it would respond to manually turning it on through the terminal and trying to eject, etc.

Anyway, I can't see why changing this BIOS setting would have done anything, but now it doesn't even consistently show the BIOS--sometimes it just stays black.

This is an old laptop I was trying to reformat with Arch Linux, though I couldn't even start because of the CD drive problem. It's a Dell Inspiron 700m.

Does anyone have any ideas? I could potentially hook it up to a monitor I have somewhere, see if that outputs anything, but I'm kind of at a loss since the drive still does not eject even during boot, so there's no way for me to even run a livecd. Yipes!

Help me see my BIOS using a monitor attached to VGA out on my laptop. Please?

merocet — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:52:57 -0800

How can I force a laptop to use VGA out during boot up prior to windows loading so that I can get into the BIOS and change the primary display to be permanently the VGA out? I have an old Dell Inspiron 8600 on which the screen has completely died. It's really broken. It's not coming back.

I have a used Acer screen (Acer AL2223Wd) which I've hooked up to the VGA out on the back of the laptop and it's working great. Just like having a new computer.

When I boot up, the screen doesn't register input from the laptop until windows starts up. That means I can't see BIOS screens.

In order to force the laptop to use VGA Out as primary display so I can see the BIOS, I need to be able to see the BIOS so I end up with a chicken and egg situation.

Any ideas how to force this?

Things tried:
Func F8 to toggle display prior to windows start.
Disconnected laptop screen so the only working display is on the VGA out.
Read the whole internet but can only find people with the same issue, no solutions.

Help?

help my student get a working laptop

jessamyn — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:38:20 -0800

Why can't I get into the BIOS on this Thinkpad? Alternately, how can I get this machine working? I have a student at the high school that I work at who brought me a sort of working laptop. I'd like to get it working if I can. Here's the particular failure mode. Yes I have checked the other posts tagged Thinkpad. Yes it is his laptop. No he doesn't know the password.

- it's a Thinkpad 600 w/ no battery
- computer turns on like normal, fan goes on, HD seems to spin, CD drive light goes on
- no matter what key I hold [to get into the BIOS, to boot from a CD, whatever] it doesn't go into BIOS or do anything other than this routine, I don't even get the IBM splash screen. I hold F1 with the computer off and keep holding it, no love.
- what I DO get is the RAM count screen and then a weird password entry screen
- entering no password takes me to this next window (1, 2) which then hangs no matter whether I press OK or CANCEL
- entering the wrong password three times locks me at the password entry window

I looked up the errors and 161 and 163 seem to indicate that the battery is dead and the time/date aren't set. No problem. 301 is a keyboard problem of some sort, though the keyboard seems to work okay for entering passwords. So I'm assuming this means there's a password on the BIOS. Is there a way to get around this? Should I tell this kid he needs to get a battery?

The laptop belongs to a sort of hard luck kid at school and if I can fix this, get Ubuntu running on it or whatever, then the kid will have a laptop. If I can't fix it, he probably won't. So I'm hoping there's something I can do short of sending him off with another project. I have the laptop here with me. I saw the soldering project approach but that may be a little more work than I can do with the tools I have available. I've done some Googling but was hoping someone here could give me some advice on something that will work. Thanks!

How to access advanced BIOS settings on an Asus notebook?

przepla — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:18:25 -0800

Some time ago I was able to access hidden BIOS settings on my M50Vm Asus notebook and change memory settings for my video card. Now I need to change them back but have no idea how to access it again. I know that there is some magic key combination (and it's not ctrl+F1) but Google seems useless. After very intensive googling it appears that I am not the only victim of forgetting the magic keys for Asus advanced BIOS settings. Also Google seems to indicate that one needs to press this combination instead of usual F2 to enter Advanced Bios.

Standard ctrl+F1 definitely does not work.

Help me fix a hard drive that fails at 86%

patrad — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:54:46 -0800

How can I recover anything off this hard drive that fails low level scans at 86%? I'm fixing a friend's computer. He has a SATA 160gb Maxtor drive. First, the XP registry went and would BSOD on boot and recovery. After chkdsk failed a couple times and I could not fix or restore the registry, I installed Win7 on a new SATA drive. Once installed, it started to recognize the other drive and I managed to copy a couple folders over.

Then Win7 stopped recognizing the drive. Rebooted, and the BIOS sees the drive but Win7 does not. I can boot into PE and run drive diagnostics.

SeaTools just stops at 86%.
MHDD scans fine until 86.3% at which point it shows about 49 UNC (Uncorrectable Errors) and 27 AMNF (address mark not found)

Clearly something is failing at that point on the platter. At this point I'm stuck. What tool is best to be able to copy the 86% of the drive over to the new one and start file recovery if possible?

What caused my drive to die?

comradestu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:22:07 -0800

What happened that suddenly caused my harddrive to not be recognized by BIOS? I fired up my computer this evening to discover that none of the SATA devices were being recognized during POST/in BIOS. This included 1 LG DVD writer, 1 Seagate 1TB drive, and 1 Seagate 500gb drive.

[After panicing] I took out all 3 devices and tried them individually in two different computers. It appears that both the 1TB drive and the DVD writer are detected by BIOS on their own, and the 500gb drive is not. When the 500gb drive is coupled with either component, nothing is detected.

No strange noises are being made by this harddrive. It does sound like it's spinning up, but I can't be 100% sure. The drive was functioning fine when I was using it last night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened during the shut down procedure.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, on ~2 month old hardware. Motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. This 500gb drive (model ST3500320AS) however, is older. I'm currently looking for the receipt to determine exactly how old it is.

Do I have any hope of prying data off this drive? I don't own a SATA enclosure for 3.5" drives, but I can probably borrow one from a co-worker tomorrow (or buy one). Since having this drive plugged in seems to cause every other SATA device to stop working, I can't use a live cd to run testdisk or similar software.

More importantly, did this drive die on it's own, or could there be something else going on? How can I test for such a possibility?

(I'll mention that I do have backups of important files, so this shouldn't be a big issue.. But who wants to download 20gb of games off Steam again?)

I need a specific CMS that allows each user to edit one part of a page.

grumblebee — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:27:46 -0800

I need a page of bios integrated into a WordPress site. I would like to give each person the ability to update his own bio without letting him mess with other people's bios. It would be awesome if the list was alphabetized. In other words, if you visit the bio page, you'll see something like this:

Fred Alberts has worked at Acme for five years. He lives in New Jersey...

Alice Jordan loves the NY Times Crossword and...

Peter Smith is a gourmet chef who has lived in London and Paris...

If, say, Alice no longer likes the crossword puzzles, I would like her to be able to log in someplace and change her bio, but I don't want her to be able to change Fred's bio.

This system will slowly grow in terms of me adding more people. Currently, there are about 100 people. I will probably add about ten more people to it each year. These people will regularly want to update their bios, and I don't want them to have to email me each time they want a change made.

Ultimately, I want all the bios on to be on one page of a Wordpress blog.

Is this something that exists already, or do I have to code it myself?

Painted into a corner, I fear

flabdablet — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:30:54 -0800

Did I just brick this computer? This hand-me-down K7T266 based PC had previously been diagnosed with a faulty PS/2 keyboard port, and the owner had been advised that this was not worth fixing and that he should just use a USB keyboard, which he was doing. Windows XP Home ran just fine this way. However, there was no obvious way to get to the BIOS settings as the BIOS didn't recognize the USB keyboard, and thus no obvious way to boot from CD.

No problem, says me cheerfully; we'll just reset the CMOS settings, which should make it enable legacy USB keyboard support from powerup, and let us get to the BIOS settings screen using your USB keyboard. So I do the usual jumper dance.

Bad move. On startup, it now announces that that the CMOS settings are wrong (fair enough) and prompts to press F1 to enter Setup or F2 to load defaults and continue - but it still won't accept USB keyboard input, so it just sits there. It never gets as far as trying to boot, either from disk or anything else.

We tried plugging in a PS/2 keyboard but that does, indeed, not work. We also tried plugging the USB keyboard into one of the mobo USB ports after I noticed that it was attached to a PCI add-on card; no change. The owner says that he seems to recall being told that the mobo USB ports were faulty as well, which is why the add-on card was installed. Sigh.

So it seems my helpfully helpful help has cost him the use of his old computer. Anybody got any good ideas for getting it going again, or have I just obligated myself to find, supply and fit a replacement K7T266 mobo?

BIOS Schmios

ZackTM — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:16:46 -0800

How can I get XP onto my laptop... if I only have a 3.5inch drive, and my BIOS is one version away from letting me boot by USB? Alright, I'm stuck and I need some ideas. I've bought a cheap laptop from the state surplus auction and it seems to be working fine. Battery charges, screen looks good... but they must have wiped the entire hard-drive completely because I don't have any operating system.

I tried booting w/ a USB boot disk but it hangs on the splash screen because my BIOS has a bug in it that got removed by the next release.

I don't have immediate access to a 3.5in drive/disk to make a bootdisk but I could probably find a way to make one. Problem is I don't have a way to make my Windows XP CD install into a 3.5in disk sized file set.

What's the best step-by-step way to get from no operating system to Windows XP?

Can't boot AMD BIOS w/ plugged-in USB hard drive?

xmutex — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:15:54 -0800

Why can't I boot my computer (even past BIOS) with a USB hard drive attached? The BIOS POST test doesn't even complete- it doesn't get to the point of autodetection of the IDE chain- if I have a USB hard drive attached. Unplugging the device allows the system to continue to boot. I've tried turning on/off "USB Legacy Support" in the BIOS, no go. Any clues?

I have a Gigabyte motherboard (GM-MA74GM-S2) running AMD BIOS RS740. This is a server, so it's kinda sorta essential for that drive to be plugged in all the time.

Maybe we should just throw this clunker out

curagea — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:58:40 -0800

Double whammy! Persistent "ghost" floppy drive, and slow, halting performance, all on my parents' PC. My parents' PC is an HP Pavilion a412n of 5+ years, on Windows XP Professional. It has enough problems for the past year or two, to warrant two questions:

1. Everytime it start it up, whether from a fresh boot, hiberation, or stand-by, I get "Floppy disk(s) fail (40)". Then, I have to press F2 to continue with the booting, which proceeds along fine.

The floppy drive is long gone already. "All right", I thought. "Let's just disable the floppy drive then in the BIOS." Did just that, reboot, yay, the message is gone!

Until the next time I boot it up/revive from hiberation. The message appears again. Then I go back into the BIOS to disable the floppy drive. Lather/rinse/repeat. A couple of times, I rebooted after disabling the non-existent drive, and it STILL gives me the damn message.

What's up here? Some mystery cable in the computer? I didn't think a floppy CABLE alone would cause the problem. Another drive messing with us? We have a ZIP drive and a dual-layer DVD burner (why, I don't know, my dad's stupid sometimes) with no problems. A faulty BIOS? I hate to think that's the case, since it might mean "just frickin' buy a new PC already", and money is tight these days. Help!

2. The PC is always "working". The hard drive light is always blinking/on, except after an HD defrag or when it's off. I've tried spyware scans, virus scans, defragging and Glary Utilities for the temp files and whatever. However, I don't use Glary's Registry cleaner, since from past experience, any Register cleaner eventually screwed up something that snowballs into a schizophrenic PC. Also, I've looked up on "unnecessary" Windows services and tweaked those too. Nope.

Surfing the Internet is sluggish too, but not bandwidth-wise. Usually, after clicking a link, the PC kind of lags before continuing on. This happens in IE7. I could try to get my mom and pop to convert to Firefox, but it's hard to teach these old dogs new tricks. They tried Firefox once and said they didn't like it *gasp*. I doubt they'll like Opera either.

FWIW, it's a Celeron processor, which I know is pretty weak to begin with. But in the PC's early days, it was preppy. Net surfing was a snap. Now, everytime I'm by my mom's side, she complains about how slow the PC is.

My parents do the most basic of computing basics: read email, write documents and spreadsheets, once in a while listen to someone's podcast or watch YouTube for business. No one else uses the PC. The HD is only a quarter full.

So, what's the verdict? Can I prep this old PC into shape again without reinstalling (did that once, didn't help matters)? What other cleanups am I missing, if any?

No "buy a new PC" or "get a Mac" or "get Linux" advice, please. Money's tight, and like I said: I can't teach those two old dogs new tricks.

My laptop (Compal IFL90/Sager 2090) wont boot up! Blank screen, HD, CD drive still whirring. DESPERATE help needed! More details inside...

Javed_Ahamed — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:05:35 -0800

My laptop (Compal IFL90/Sager 2090) wont boot up! Blank screen, HD, CD drive still whirring. DESPERATE help needed! More details inside... When i started up my laptop today (Compal IFL90/Sager 2090) it showed me the normal Phoenix BIOS startup screen, and then i accidently pressed one of the "special" keyboard buttons on the far left of the laptop, the one on the top which i believe is a button to charge the battery only up to a certain percentage to help save battery life (i never use it). Well anyway, I press this button I believe during the Phoenix startup screen and my computer just turns off. When i turn it back on the monitor does not turn on meaning its not even black but completely off with the normal green tint. However, I hear my harddrive working and if i insert a CD it wirrs up as well. No matter how many times i turn off and turn on my computer its the same thing it will not get to my GRUB menu (i dual boot ubuntu and vista). This makes me believe its a BIOS or a hardware problem but im not really sure.

Things I have done so far: (have not done much since i don't want to screw up comp further)
-removed battery and held power button down for a min, no luck
-tried a/c only without battery

Anyway, this is really my only computer and im a CS student so i really need it up and running again. ANY help you could give even ideas would be appreciated im freaking out thanks! :)

Disk Drawer Double Bind

Acheman — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:09:57 -0800

My friend's only Admin account on Windows has been ripped to shreds by a virus, an uninstaller program, or both; his CD drawer won't open or shut manually at all; and his BIOS settings, which are protected by a password we don't know, are to boot from a CD in the drive before anything else. Help me to not destroy his computer with an axe. I'm a Mac user who somehow became the Tech Support for our shared house. (It started with showing a friend how to use a bittorrent client and is now way beyond my control.) For various reasons, one friend's computer never got the once-over, with new antivirus software etc., that I'd been meaning to give it. I thought 'Hey, he uses Firefox and hardly ever even downloads anything. Things won't go too badly wrong for the time being'. And boy am I regretting that now.

A couple of days ago, he came to me telling me that his five-years-old antivirus software had detected virus infection, and this was corroborated by the appearance of thousands of popup windows for a poker site. The antivirus told him it had deleted four viruses, but clearly hadn't - the popups continued along with some other strange stuff. He immediately shut the computer down and came to me.

When we started up the computer, the popups appeared to calm down to a manageable level. I decided to get rid of his old antivirus and install AVG. Here's where a couple of nights' terrible insomnia led to my making a mistake: I tried to do those two things in that order. After deleting a bunch of files Revo Uninstaller suggested I delete, I couldn't open any programs from his user account - I got messages saying that it was 'not authorised' to open them. Switching to the Guest account meant I was able to do anything the Guest account can do, but this didn't include installing AVG or repairing his Admin account. The Guest account started to be beset by popups after a few minutes and we shut down.

My friend still has his Windows XP pro CDs and doesn't have any important files he can't retrieve from email attachments, or any music that isn't from his own CDs. So we were all set to do a clean reinstall, until he reminded me about the CD drive.

Since he dropped the computer about six months ago, the CD drawer won't open or shut manually - it has to be opened using his DVD-reading software. Also, his BIOS settings are set to boot from the CD drive if there's anything in it, and always have been. This has already caused problems when he left a CD in the drawer before shutting the computer down, but after attempting to boot for about five minutes it would move on to the HD and all would be well again. Trouble is, this won't work when trying to reinstall Windows from the CD - as I understand it, it can and will just boot from the Windows installation CD again and again and again.

I'd already tried to reset the BIOS settings, but they're password protected and he was never told what the password was. (He got it as part of a government entitlement for disabled students, and so it came from some little outsourced office somewhere).

This weird little logic loop is most tormenting: I can't boot from the hard drive until I've removed the disk with the DVD software, and I can't remove the disk with the DVD software until I've booted from the hard drive.

Will a USB external CD drive work to install Windows from straight out of the box? Can I get a pirate version of Windows and install it from a USB flash drive? Is there some really simple, far less radical solution to this that I'm missing? I'm in way over my head with this, and keep coming back to fantasies about the violence I might enact upon this infernal devil-box.

New computer build--No signal input on monitor?

saguaro — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:55:42 -0800

I just cobbled together a computer for the first time, and while it powers up OK (fans and drives awhirring) I get nothing on the screen. No signal input. What did I mess up? Did I kill my CPU? I've got the monitor plugged into the onboard graphics card.

Here's the board: GIGABYTE GA-M61PME-S2 AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 / nForce 430 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
and the CPU:
AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Dual-Core Processor

Happy to produce any other relevant details. Please go easy, I'm not a total n00b, but close.
I appreciate your help, thank you in advance!

I'm up at 2am because my computer is down. Help me get it to boot!

dudeman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:07:16 -0800

My PC was working fine until tonight. I rebooted to fix a BIOS setting (to enable the onboard Ethernet port) and since then it won't boot properly anymore. The PC POSTs fine, keyboard is initialized, I can enter the BIOS setup fine and make any changes I like, then save them. After that, the screen blanks and I'm left staring at a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Nothing happens. How can I troubleshoot this and fix it? Keyboard is now nonresponsive. As far as I know the PC is not even trying to boot. If I hit "F9" to select my boot device, it doesn't show me the boot device screen. Every time I boot, same problem.

This is a 1 year old PC assembled from parts. Biostar TF-7025-M2 motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 dual core processor. 3GB RAM, Antec 350 power supply. Onboard video. Maxtor SATA hard drive. Panasonic DVD-writer. IBM keyboard. I've disconnected everything else. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on the system. GRUB should be loading from the MBR on the hard drive and displaying options, but it is not.

The BIOS settings include a built in burn-in-utility (memory tester) which I have tried enabling. It won't run it.

I've tried booting from the hard drive and booting from several different rescue CDs - Ubuntu Live CD, Ultimate Boot CD, with no success.

I've tried clearing the CMOS via the internal jumper. CMOS is cleared but this doesn't solve the problem.

I'm thinking that this could be:

a) bad power supply (can run BIOS but can't boot?)
b) bad motherboard (but wouldn't I get some other indication of a problem?)

Any suggestions how to troubleshoot? I don't have a spare power supply or motherboard to swap in, unless I'm willing to cannibalize my Windows PC (can't do that!)

Dell Inspiron 5100 BIOS password reset?

doomtop — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:04:46 -0800

Dell Inspiron 5100 BIOS password reset? Dell Inspiron 5100 has a BIOS password set. Won't boot the computer, won't allow access to the BIOS without entering password. Don't know password.

From what I've read you have to completely disassemble the laptop to disconnect something and then re-solder it afterwards in order to reset the password.

I've also read that Dell can generate a master password if you can prove ownership. I don't know who owned this thing originally though.

Any way to generate a master password without Dell's help??

I found a master password generator software, but doesn't work for my system number, which ends in A95B. I guess if I had an older model this would work. Is there a master password generator for these newer ones? I've looked and looked, but came up short.

I saw this previous question but the guy didn't get the answer I'm looking for. I'm hoping the newer master password generator may be more available nowadays...