Bios

[jhuntermartin]

I tried Flashing my BIOS and as the instructions said I saved the Fail Safe Settings. When i reboot the computer tries to boot from CD and not from the hard drive. I changed the boot sequence to Hard Drive, CD, Floppy but the computer still wants to boot from CD. Whats wrong?

[Sylvander]

Until you find a solution to the BIOS problem, you could use an "Emergency boot CD" [EBCD]; boot to that and use it to re-specify that the PC should boot from some other drive [e.g. the HDD or floppy].
You can do that by using either the included "Smart Boot Manager", or use one of the menu options that directly allows you to specify the HDD as the drive from which to boot.

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How to make an EBCD bootable CD

1. Go to http://ebcd.pcministry.com/ then click the "Download" link in the list on the left, then at the next window, click on "ebcd-0.6.1-pro-sfx.exe" [the 17155 k version], click a mirror near you and download the file to a suitable folder on your PC.
I couldn't get Firefox to download it, so used Internet Explorer which worked ok.

2. "Open" the ebcd file. I think it's a self-extracting compressed archive.
When I clicked on the copy I downloaded, WinRAR ran and asked if I wanted to click the "Install" button to begin the extraction, which I did and it was successful. Then I "Erased" the resulting folder and tried a right-click and "Extract to here..." which also worked.

3. Go into the "ebcd-0.6.1-pro" folder and [right-click and] "Open" the "makeebcd.exe" file. When this runs a DOS window will open to show the progress of the making of the "Ebcd061p.iso" file.
That is the very important iso image file that you must use to create a bootable CD-RW [or CD-R] disk.

4. Now you must run some program like "Easy CD Creator" or "Nero", go to "File->Create CD from image file..." [or similar], navigate to the iso file you just made, choose it and ok it. If you have supplied a suitable CD the program will write the file system contained in the iso to that disk to make it bootable.

5. When you have made the bootable EBCD, you must restart your PC and boot from the EBCD.
To do that you can either:
a) Set your BIOS setup so the PC boots from the CD, or...
b) [What I do] Use "Smart Boot Manager", boot from that and tell it to boot from [one of] your CD-drive[s].

6. The EBCD will boot to the first menu. Once there you could, for example, choose to enter 2 to boot the "File Manager" [provides NTFS support], or enter 1 [or just hit "Enter" because 1 is the default] to be taken to the 2nd menu and choose "Volkov Commander". The program will ask if you want to load the mouse driver [say yes], use English [say yes], load CD driver [say no or yes, not important].

7. Having typed 2 to open "File Manager", you will be asked...
a. Load mouse driver? [Yes]
b. Load English locale? [yes]
c. Load CD driver? [not necessary]
d. SCSI? [no]
e. Start Network? [no]
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In File Manager:
f. Double click a folder to open it and see the contents.
g. Click on the file to highlight it ["select" it]
h. Click "Delete" down at the bottom of the screen [number 8], and confirm.

This program deletes things really fast; I deleted all the folders and files unpacked from the ebcd archive file. Had to keep hitting "Enter" to ok the deletions. Blip, blip, blip, real fast.
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