BIOS - All devices are disabled?

BaileyB

Hi

My friend brought over his laptop (XP) which he said does not work and when it boots it asks which device would he like to boot to.

So i went into the bios and found the CDROM and HDD are disabled. The CDROM does not work and there is no power light going to it.

Any ideas how i can get them both working again as there does not seem a way in the Bios to change them.

Any help would be great

Thanks

John_Gray

BaileyB wrote: »

So i went into the bios and found the CDROM and HDD are disabled.

When you say 'disabled' I presume you mean 'disabled from acting as the boot device'.
Simply enable the HDD as the first (or only) boot device in the BIOS.

The problem with the CDROM is likely to be a different problem. Have you checked that the power connector is correctly fixed at the back of the CDROM device?

The_JinJ

May be a cable loose for the IDE? Would explain why both don't power up. Means taking apart the laptop - what make/model is it?

Also try removing and re-seating the drives from their bays.

BaileyB

How do you enable them? As there is no option for that in the BIOS

Its a Parkard Bell Easynote MIT-RHEAC

John_Gray

BaileyB wrote: »

How do you enable them? As there is no option for that in the BIOS.

There is - you just haven't found out how to do it yet!

Who is the manufacturer of the BIOS? Phoenix? AMI? (It will say at the top of each BIOS page). Different BIOS manufacturers use subtly different ways of enabling/disabling boot devices and changing the sequence in which they are tried.

BaileyB

Thanks everyone, just removed the cdrom and hdd and now all working. must have come loose at some stage