Difficulty entering BIOS to make changes

[L8ed]

I've got a five year old Compaq Presairio 5695. I've upgraded it to XP and am now in the process of putting a larger HD in it. I used Norton Ghost to clone the smaller HD to the larger and then figured I'd simply switch the IDE cable to change the logical address and boot order. Eventually I plan to reformat the 18 gig and have a total of 58 gigs. Anyway, it's not been working quite so smoothly. The new 40 gig HD was given the logical address of E: when I had them both in and it is not changing now that I've made the change of IDE cables. This is giving me fits when I reinstall various software - I believe they are NOT working in the cloned (new) drive because the registry is expecting to see them in C:! How in the world in this Compaq do I get to BIOS. I've not found anything on the Compaq/HP site and I can't find it in help, etc. Does someone out there know what key to push and and what point in the post to push it to get me into BIOS?

L8ed

 

[josedawg]

To get into BIOS its usually F1, F2, or DEL (delete).

The problem you're having doesnt seem to stem from a BIOS problem, but a Windows problem.
The following should work:

1) Right click "My Computer" icon on your desktop and click "Manage"
2) When the "Computer Management" window pops up, proceed to "Disk Management" which is under "Storage"
3) Right click the E: drive in the list and select "Change drive letters and path"
4) Press the "Change" button and proceed to change the drive's letter to C (This will not work if there's another drive showing up as the letter C)

Hope this works.

 

[Jeff7]

F10 maybe.

 

[L8ed]

Thanks. F10 got me to BIOS and manage disks in WinXP got me the rest. I now face the issue that WinXP will not let me change the system drive to c: because it is active. Is there a way to override this?

sm

 

[josedawg]

Is there a drive as the C: drive? Maybe one of your optical (cd/dvd/cdrw) drives?

 

[bacillus]

you can't change the drive letter that xp is installed on

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: bacillus
you can't change the drive letter that xp is installed on

If it was originally cloned from a "C:" drive, I'd assume you can

Partition Magic had a Windows utility for changing generic registry and configuration files system wide to point to a new disk. I believe it also let you set drive letters.