[ale] Defective BIOS?

[Cor van Dijk]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

>On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 22:05 -0400, Cor van Dijk wrote:
>  
>
>>One of my older machines has  windows  on /dev/hda and redhat on 
>>/dev/hdd. It suddenly refused to boot the /dev/hda. Will only boot 
>>redhat from a floppy. When I do "/sbin/lilo -t" it tells me
>>        "Warning: BIOS drive 0x82 may not be accessible"
>>Initially I thought it was the physical drive, so I tried 3 (three) 
>>different
>>drives on /dev/hda, all with the same result, so I am tending to believe 
>>that the problem is actually were the message says that it is, in the BIOS.
>>When I try to put the boot record on /dev/hdd I get the same message.
>>Replacing the 3 volt battery does no good (old one still had over 3 volt 
>>after nine years!)
>>Curious thing is that I can mount /dev/hda from /dev/hdd just fine.
>>Does the BIOS prevent me from accessing the boot sector in /dev/hda?
>>The mobo is probably a pirated item from china, but the BIOS chip is an 
>>AWARD, and is  probably tailored to fit the mobo, might be hard to find 
>>a replacement.
>>Any pointers? What is BIOS drive 0x82? Is it actually the BIOS? Can it 
>>be fixed?
>>Thanks in advance for any help. Cor van Dijk
>>    
>>
>You've got hardware problems. The address 0x82 is the address of the
>first drive on the second controller. In order to boot, the BIOS has to
>be able to talk to the boot sector of the drive. 
>
>Here's a test: pull the IDE cable off the Linux drive an put the primary
>IDE cable from the windows drive onto the Linux drive. If the drive
>tries to boot (i.e you see the lilo screen) the bios is crapped. If it
>does nothing, the drive is crapped.
>
>A work around might be to put the Linux drive on the same cable with the
>windows drive. Be sure to set up the Linux drive as slave to avoid all
>sorts of fun.
>
>
>
>  
>
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Thanks for your help. I did put the linux drive on IDE1 and in fact it 
did tried to boot, that is, it came up with "L". That means the BIOS 
chip is gone?
To Randal Jarret: there is no "boot protection" anywhere in the BIOS 
screens.

I am kind of hesitant to start the BIOS from scratch, do I need to write 
down a sh...load of settings prior to doing that? Suppose one of them is 
the culprit, then I would end up in the same situation. There used to be 
DOS programs that would save and rewrite BIOS info, but I can't find them.

In my initial post I forgot to mention that I tried the old DOS standby
"FDISK /MBR", which is supposed to rewrite the bootsector . Did do no good.
Thanks again, Cor