Randomly when I boot up, my bios give me a Pri Master HDD error and then doesnt boot up from the hard drive. In the cmos the Pri Master Installed entry is erased and I have to auto set again. Often my bios double beeps during the error, according to AMI bios 2 beeps has to do with memory parity. My computer otherwise runs fine. My cmos entry gets erased maybe once every 2 or three days. Strange? My PC vendor says it could be a failing hard drive. I've also heard that viruses can delete cmos settings. Does anyone have any ideas?
AMD T-bird 1333MHZ
MSI K7T 266 motherboard
Maxtor diamond max 40gb 7200RPM
Geforce 2 Ultra 64mb DDR
512 MB DDR
Win 98 SE

Hello Juxtapose,

Welcome tohttp://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif Forums!

I would suggest taking a look at the CMOS battery contacts, or if your MB has been around awhile...replacing it. If it keeps reverting to the defaults it sure would seem like a battery problem.

Im pretty sure its not the cmos battery because all of my other cmos settings stay the same. Just every once in awhile only the Pri Master entry is lost and I have to use auto detection.

Jux

Ah...I misunderstood, I thought the whole BIOS was resetting to default.

Are you running an AV program? Nothing shows up?

You might want to run POWERMAX (http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/techsupport/TechnicalProcedures/20014.htm) which might turn up something. Be sure to follow the directions for downloading (i.e. not directly to a floppy).

Well I was running Norton 2002 but I had to remove it as this bios problem some how corrupted it. Norton didn't really find anything major. A few months ago I was infected with the Nimda virus, but I cleaned it with a AV utility. I was wondering if it could be a boot sector virus, perhaps I should format/mbr
Does formatting a hard drive clear viruses? And can file viruses affect the bios? Also could failing RAM cause this problem? I recently upgraded from 256 to 512 DDR.

thanks

Jux

Hmmmmmmm.......

Some of the Viri deposit themselves into memory and avoid detection unless the AV is designed to root out there also.

It does sound like something's a bit fishy, especially given the Nimda background.

If you do use the Powermax utility....I would download from a known "clean" computer and then write protect it. Don't use yours, as you could be infecting the diskettes since they are being written to during the d/l process.

You'll want to wait to hear from mjc, Pete, or one of the folks more familiar with Viri than I.

If you're gonna reload...you'd best get a HDD wipe utility that zeros out the whole disk before doing so.

Something is definitely wrong, and I would go with the virus theory first, as it may be one of the easier ones to check.

Like Whyz said, write protect your floppies. There are a couple of DOS based AV apps around...