Need help with PC from brother!

[Floris]

PLEASE ADVISE ME :: My brother booted his system up and while booting, he put in a USB cable. He noticed it didn't boot properly and restarted. Now the system says 'bios info ' and 'detecting IDE devices...' and hangs. it doens't do anything no more. It says to press DEL or another key to enter bios, but pressing that during boot or while it hangs, doesn't work. What could be wrong ?

He has rebooted a few times to test, shutting down hard and soft reboot and with and without usb cable. But it keeps hanging on 'detecting ide'.


on IRC i was adviced to reset the bios. How?

[Radon3k]

I believe to reset the BIOS you have to take the CMOS battery out of the motherboard for something like 30 seconds and then put it back in. At least that's how it is on mine. I believe on some motherboards you can just reset the jumper as well. The motherboard manual should tell you how.

[Floris]

I hope his system came with one

[Mainer82]

You said he plugged in a USB cable, but for what? A camera, or HDD or mouse? It depends on what the device is. Has he tried unplugging the device?

[MrNase]

does your brother have a manual for that motherboard? Some have a jumper that needs to be removed. Once removed try to boot the computer. It should not turn on. Place the jumper back to it's previous place and boot again. That should work.

(removing the battery works, too. But than you have to wait )

[Joe Gronlund]

If it hangs on detecting the the IDE drives, then there is a drive conflict that will not reset itself.

You can do one of two things.

Removes all drives but 1 (Primary Master) and let it detect that as the master. you can leave the floppy on.
shutdown and add all other drives one by one, making sure all jumper settings are correct.

To reset your bios you would have to post your Motherboard make and model, but most are cleared by either placing a jumper on two leads (what that does is stops the battery from being connected to the CMOS chip itself and after about 3-5 secs will clear the chip and the defaults will be set)

The other way is by touch two small ball shaped extrusions that lead out from the motherboard together, (you connect them together by using a small solid metal object and leave them touching for 10 seconds)

before doing any clearing of the CMOS you must find out which way is the proper way to clear your CMOS chip, any damage to it and you will have a unbootable system..

[Floris]

I think it is for a printer or a scanner or a digital camera. Unfortn. he didn't mention that.

He just phoned that he found a company open at evening - he is going there now to have them reset the bios or try other stuff out to make it work.

[Floris]

He has one drive, with 2 or more partitions, it is not really clear to me right now. It is a new pc, and they are glad windows is a drag & drop envirenment

[qxh]

You know, this just happened to me, though I managed to boot Windows ME and do a restore, that usually fixes most problems with Windows, Linux or anything else, somehow!