What happened to my motherboard?

Question

I was trying to install a new vid card and I was having troubles with the installation. I read to go into my BIOS and set some feature to some setting. I didn't know what I was doing exactly and I hit load optimal defaults. Now when my comp starts it is not reading any drives. I looked back in the BIOS and everything seems to be wiped. It says the only drive is the 1st floppy drive and it is not detecting any for of IDE or slave drives or anything at all. I cannot get into my computer. I tried to wipe it clean by attempting to boot from my xp disc however the only drive it reads is the 1st floppy and I do not even have a floppy drive installed. Please help me through this so I can avoid the expenses. Thank you in advance

The mobo is an ECS RC410L/800-M running CMOS v0.02.52 American Megatrends Inc.

I've looked at all of the IDE and slave drives and the all say not detected. Also, when I go in to choose which drive to read, normally there is a hard drive, and 2 other cd/dvd rom drives to choose from. Now when I go to choose there is nothing. The only option is to choose the 1st floppy drive and I don't have one connected. Everything is set to auto. So i'm really at a complete loss. Thank you so much for the help so far.

Answer 1

I sounds like only the setting in the BIOS was overritten. This means that the data is still on the hard drive, and xp is still there, but the motherboard isn't detecting it. Now, I'm not sure what kind of motherboard or bios you have, but go into the bios screen, and look through the screens until you see options which show "ide master 1" and "ide slave 1" and so on. Select them and use the +/- (or whatever key specified) to make them show up one of your drives. This should allow the bios to actually detect them. Do this for each of the ide master and slave to accomodate all of the drives that you have. Save and reboot, you should be fine. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Go back into the BIOS setup and look around. There should be a place where you can set what IDE drives are installed on the computer. (Unfortunately, it is different with BIOS, and you did not give a BIOS version, so can not be more specific.) Usually you have to set each of those devices to "Automatic" or "AutoDetect". Then the PC should start seeing the drives again.

DO NOT run the XP set up disc. That will not change your BIOS. Instead it could affect your Windows installation and make it so that even after BIOS detects the drives again, that Windows will not boot. Running the XP setup will not resolve BIOS issues.

Answer 3

It may be that your BIOS has faulty programming, it is rare, but it still happens. Case in point, I once bought a motherboard by PC Chips several years ago. After assembling the computer, I was unable to install any software on the system. I went over the manual again and again, checking each component, but nothing worked. After some searching on the internet, I found out that the company that had manufactured the motherboard had shipped a defective product. They even mentioned it in their website, offereing a free download for the correct BIOS software for that model of motherboard. Hell, even the FTP site wouldn't work, not that everyone has an Eprom encoder laying around anyway.

Answer 4

Hi
I think these might solve your problem:-
>Check your wires inside your computer and check if your hard drive is removed remove it and connect it so your sure it wasn't the prob.
>Or try going to bios and check the settings in the boot thing maybe i think you have put to load the floppy and you might have not selected the hard drive so try this too.
>IF this doesnt solve your problem then contact a a repair guy and get it fixed
Best Wishes
Chulan

Answer 5

Go back into bios on the first page maneuver through the page using arrow keys and set each drive to auto detect, sanve settings and your drives should all be there.