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Primary and secondary hard drives changed in bios?

ascendant

ascendant

Senior member
When I tried to start my computer up this evening, during the boot-up process, it kept telling me to insert a boot-up disk or something along those lines. Basically, it was clear to me that it wasn't booting my OS (Win) off my primary hard drive.

I went into my bios and realized that my primary and secondary hard drives were swapped. Since I have no OS on my secondary, I changed it back. However, I am at a complete and utter loss as to why this would have happened?

I am just not sure what to do at this point as I have no idea if this is a typical warning sign of bios failure, hard drive failure, or maybe I just need to open my computer and make sure all the connections are good? Maybe it is even just a very rare fluke that can happen? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. I have a ton of important information on my primary hard drive and not enough space (or time for that matter) to back it all up. Any feedback/advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
You may just need to replace the CMOS battery on the motherboard.

It also wouldn't hurt to download a utility from the hard drive manufacturer website to test the drives for errors, just to be on the safe side.

If you don't have a current system backup, you probably ought to take the time to create one.
 
Steltek said:
You may just need to replace the CMOS battery on the motherboard.

It also wouldn't hurt to download a utility from the hard drive manufacturer website to test the drives for errors, just to be on the safe side.

If you don't have a current system backup, you probably ought to take the time to create one.
Click to expand...

I believe I do have a utility that will let me do that. I'll also have to look into how to replace that battery. I have had the mobo for at least 5 years now and have never replaced it, so that very well might be the problem. Thanks for the information.
 
IIRC I have seen this happen before. I had a Flash drive in a computer during a reboot, and the system got confused with the new possible boot device in there.

I don't know that this is necessarily a problem if no other BIOS data was affected.

Once way to prevent this from happening in the future would be to plug your primary hard drive into the SATA1 port, since that's where it would look by default anyway.
 
Thanks again for the information. I thought I did have my primary plugged into the SATA1 port, but I will have to check again tomorrow to be sure.

Anyway, it has not happened again, and I have turned my computer off and on several times since that incident. I don't know, maybe just a fluke?
 
the battery is easy to replace. It's a 2032 (iirc) watch battery that is plugged into a holder on the mobo. There will be a little clip on one side of the battery that you push down with a small screwdriver to pop it loose.
 
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