BIOS problems

[vtrucker]

Help Needed !!!!!

System -

ECS K7S5A mobo
K7 XP2000 processor
512 DDR ram
40 GB hd primary master
8.4 GB hd secondary master
cd rom


Built system last week, working fine, customer collected it
worked fine for a week then bios found cd rom and secondary master but couldn't find primary master hd

Reset bios and reconfigued it, worked fine for another day then above problem occurred again.

Then set bios to setting to auto detect all drives, Hooray this worked (for 2 days), then lost the primary master again.

Have checked out the ECS homepage for flash bios upgrade but none available for this type of problem.

Any Ideas

[Nathan G.]

Double check your master/slave jumpers on the harddrives.... I do not trust the cable select option.
Does the system clock loose time when this happens?
If so:
I would suspect a CMOS battery problem.
Even though the mb is new... i would replace the battery (on mb) with a new one and ensure the clip holding the battery is secure. (slightly bend tabs on clip, if needed)
Also ensure the bios/cmos chips are firmly in teir sockets. Maybe the mb has a problem in that area.

Good luck

[BigBlue66]

I'm sure you have the jumpers correctly, since it appears you build systems for a living and they wouldn't work for two days and then die.

I agree that it could be the CMOS battery. It that's good, then I would suspect a bad IDE controller on the mobo. Wouldn't be the first time.

[BipolarBill]

A flaky CDROM drive can cause these issues. If it ain't new, replace it or at least try another. This very thing happened to one K7S5A I built recently and replacing the CDROM fixed it.

[chuckiechan]

If so, I just E-mailed Ecs for advice or RMA.

It failes during a cold boot in the morning, but is fine after restart.

Is this what you are experiencing?

BTW, my battery was dead out of the box but I replaced it with the one from my old board, but didn't reset the BIOS. Not sure whether I should have...

[Terminator]

Have the same board in my second computer and was experiencing bios resets and was driving me nuts. To cut a long story short it was my fault . I had put one of the metal screw in feet underneath the motherboard in the wrong place and it was obviously shorting out periodically.

Just a thought. Check under the motherboard and check that nothing is shorting out. The other thing with these boards are really touchy about being earthed properly. Make sure you have metal feet under the silver ring holes on the motherboard and screw in the screws tight.

T

[chuckiechan]

Hey Term...What screw was it?

Trucker...Part of the advice I got from them was to try cable select.

Also said to start fresh with format...BS to that, since the problem is before the operating system. But I will try the cable select. I will let you know if it works.

I have an IBM desk star- a good one, runs like a champ. I did a drive fitness test and all is well.. Everyone 'disses IBM now a days....

Hope this helps...

EDIT: Doing the cable select didn't correct the problem from cold boot.

[Peter M]

If you have an IDE drive that is slow to start at powerup, setting "Quick Boot" to Disabled often helps.