Did My BIOS Change By Itself ??

**pgp001** · May 24th, 2005, 02:47 PM

I used my PC this morning with no trouble at all, browsed ebay for a while then turned it off as normal and went to work.
Wife rings me at work saying when she switched on again later, that there is a boot up message about a missing NTLDR, and telling her to do a ctrl/alt/del.

I checked this message out on my internet connection at work, and came home expecting to have to replace various boot files from the CD.
However, before I did that I checked the BIOS, and found that my SATA boot drive was now down at number three in the boot order, I have two other IDE drives installed also.
I reset the drive back to number one in the list, and all seems OK again.

Thing is I would dearly like to know how/why that happened, could it be a virus ?, or do I need to look elsewhere.

Thanks
Phil

**confus-ed** · May 25th, 2005, 08:14 AM

Welcome to WD forums pgp001.

There's a few things could cause this, number one suspect would be a failing cmos battery (there's a little rechargeable battery on your motherboard responsible for keeping this info 'live' between switchoffs), batteries can & do fail 'whenever' but older means more likely

I'd virus sweep for now & then look at any causes if it repeats, as there's a number of possible reasons why your machine might do this seemingly 'randomly'.

**pgp001** · May 25th, 2005, 01:40 PM

Hi
Thanks for the advise, my first thought was the back up battery, but it is a brrand new motherboard only one week old, so although not impossible it is improbable.
It was only the boot order on the hard drives which had changed, all the other settings were still OK, if the battery was at fault I would have thought the other settings would be lost as well.
I will keep an eye on it, and let you know if it re-occurs.
Phil

**tyamada** · May 26th, 2005, 08:51 AM

I have had the same problem with an ASUS P4C800E Delux mother board with an AMI bios. It happend to me three times this month alone. What happenes is the primary boot wasn't recoginized on boot up so, the mother board selected the next drive in the list to boot from, that is when you get the message about NTLDR.

What I did is to check my connections to the primary boot device, power and SATA cable. Haven't had that problem since.

**pgp001** · June 6th, 2005, 07:15 AM

I have sorted it out now.

It turned out that a BIOS update has recently been released by Soltek for exactly this problem. Flashed it to my board and so far its been OK.

Phil