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boot meun

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by burnsidedawn

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How do i change the boot meun in the BIOS? i have a hard drive that is coming up unknown and i want to boot from the other hard drive. I also put that hard drive into another CPU to see what is on it it came unknown.

5 replies

by willcomp

The BIOS boots from the first HDD it finds in this order:

Primary Master
Secondary Master
Primary Slave
Secondary Slave

In order to change the boot drive, you must set it to primary master. Set jumper on drive you wish to boot from to master and jumper on other drive to slave. Connect both to Primary IDE channel.

In other words, there likely aren't any BIOS settings that will bo the trick. Some BIOSes allow you to select a specific boot drive but they are usually on newer motherboards with built-in RAID controllers.

Dalton

by willcomp

Leave it to TheChas to flesh out my short answers. He's correct. You must have a bootable drive to boot from and the drive not detected is probably a goner.

If the bad drive has data you need to recover, try this trick after you have a bootable system.

Set jumper on bad drive to slave. Place it in a zip lock bag and put it in the freezer for about an hour. Immediately connect drive as primary slave, boot up PC, and see if drive is detected. If detected, work as fast as you can to transfer critical files to other drive.

You'd be surprised how many times this works. Probably about 25% of times I've tried it.

by thechas

Sounds like the controller on the hard drive failed. If the BIOS on 2 different PCs does not detect the drive, it is dead.
If you have critical data on the drive, you need to use data recovery techniques to recover the data.

You cannot just boot from a different hard drive.

Even with a BIOS that does allow you to select the boot drive, any drive you wish to boot from MUST be set up as a bootable drive and have an operating system installed.

Using Windows 98 as an example, the boot drive's Primary DOS partition must be set as active.
The drive must be formatted as a bootable volume.
Then, you must have Windows installed on the drive with the drive letter properly set.

Chas

by daowen

Yes but it is not the boot menu you are looking at changing but the boot device. Most newer bios's will support booting from a slave. Check under start up options boot device order. You will have to know what type of drive it is that you want to boot from and pick it as the first device.

Doug

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