My Mom called this morning because her computer wouldn't boot up. She is running win 7.
I went over and took a look at the BIOS, and the boot order was set to boot from the CD/ROM. I changed it to the HDD and it booted right up.
What would cause this apparently un-commanded change to BIOS?
Hard drive starting to go bad and not being detected by the BIOS during the boot process. I had the problem with a solid state drive (SSD) as primary boot drive running Windows 7 Ultimate. The firmware on the SSD needed updating due to a Win 7 patch.
BIOS moved the SSD drive to the bottom of the list and booted from the next available source. In my case I had a second drive set up as Win XP to be able to run some old programs. Felt like a time warp.
On my computers anyway, the CD is the first thing in the boot order. If nothing is found (no bootable disc), the computer automatically heads for the hard drive.
Did you look in the cd drive to see if any disc was in there? If there is, perhaps it is confusing the computer.
Has she had any problems with the CD-ROM drive? I have heard that a faulty CD-ROM drive can put a hitch in the boot-up.
Is there an battery on-board the motherboard?
In the old days, if the on-board battery went, BIOS settings were lost or defaulted (reset).
The CDROM is supposed to be the first item in the boot list, I suspect there is something wrong with the CDROM drive.
Thanks!
> The CDROM is supposed to be the first item in the boot list
The first item in the boot list is supposed to be whatever you told the BIOS you wanted the first item to be. I set all of my systems to boot from HDD 0.
> The CDROM is supposed to be the first item in the boot list, I suspect there is something wrong with the CDROM drive.
Correct.
This is by design so that if the hard drive gets corrupted or fails (windows does that, Duh!) you can put your install/recovery cd in and boot to fix it without futzing around with the BIOS.
If there is a cd in the drive that is not bootable it should be ignored and in moments then go to the primary hard drive and look for a bootable program, then whatever in next in the boot order as determined by the BIOS.
Yes the boot order can be changed, easily... but if it ain't broke don't fix it
By default it's supposed to be set to the CD/DVD drive, unless it doesn't come with one installed. His mother is obviously not going to be tinkering with the bios settings, so it should the default for her pc.
