Motherboad & Bios

[plasticman1]

i have a gigabyte ga-7vrxp motherboard. I was trying a friends hard disk in my machine as he was having trouble getting it to boot but i couldnt get it to boot either. i then plugged my original hard disk back in and that was when i got the problems. the bios couldnt find the hard disk and after loading up optimized defaults in bios i got it to boot up. during boot up it said 'MBU1 TRA 133(PDC 20276) BIOS is not installed because there are no drives attached'. but it eventually loaded windows with new hardware found raid blah!!!!!!!! so i put in my motherboard driver cd and it loaded the driver on. Also i have noticed another drive F: in my computer which i never had.
I think i need to flash my bios but maybe someone knows of something else i could do. i downloaded bios from gigabyte but i need to boot up from floppy but i am using windows xp pro and dont know how to boot up from floppy.can i copy the bios to a windows 98 start up disk and use that. Any help much appreciated.
Thanks in anticipation!

[adamp2p]

Man, you ask too many questions at once...could you narrow it down? B)

[plasticman1]

basically my computer doesnt boot up the way it used to

[Livy]

turn off ur comp, make sure all ur drives are plugged in right, boot up and go into nbios, and find something called auto detect drives, do that. then boot see if tgat heps?

edit: it also looks like uve enabled raid by load defaults, so just go through ur bios and turn it off, or just leave it if u dont have a clue about ur bios

[jbrockz]

doesn't raid require two hard drives installed?

[ilw]

making a disk to boot into msdos is easy in xp, just stick a floppy in, right click the drive, select format and check the 'create ms-dos boot disk' option. Then just copy the bios files to the floppy or c: drive and reboot.
But it seems weird that your suddenly having these problems, are you sure you didn't do anything strange with the cabling? How is your hard drive set up, as master or slave or do you use cable select, & is it on the primary ide or secondary.

[Livy]

Originally posted by jbrockz@22 September 2003 - 20:18
doesn't raid require two hard drives installed?

i beleive so, but the option may still be turned on in bios.

[Livy]

Originally posted by ilw@22 September 2003 - 20:20
Then just copy the bios files to the floppy or c: drive and reboot.

putting the bios files on the c drive will not work if the drive is ntfs as it will not be readable from dos, it will need to go on the floppy or another fat drive

[plasticman1]

sorry i took so long but i was trying the boot disk but it didnt make any difference. all the cables are as they were its must be something to do with that other harddisk i had plugged in.it must have interfered with this this raid thing it says somthing in the manual about motherboard array but its all double dutch to me.

[liquidacid]

First off. Swapping Hard Drives between two machines is never going to work. All the drivers installed, particularly for the mobo, are specific to each machines components.

I suggest you try auto detecting your hard drives in your machines bios, as suggested by Livy. If that doesn't work, you should try resetting your cmos. To do this you'll need to look at your mobo's manual; if you don't have it go to the manufacturers website. It's really easy, just a case of removing, or moving, a jumper from a switch on your motherboard for a short time.

I doubt there'll be any real problems with the disc itself, but i wouldn't swap between yours and your friends again.