Computer freezes at bios...

[didibus]

Hi,

I was installing windows 7 on one of my computers and when the installer rebooted, my computer could not get past the bios.

It just stops at the prompt asking you to press DEL to enter bios setup. If I do press DEL, it tries to start the bios setup but stops at:

Pri Master : WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1 17.07W17
Ultra DMA Mode-2, S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status OK

This is my hard drive by the way. Now, if I remove my hard drive, and enter the bios, it works. I successfully get inside the bios setup. I can even boot a linux distro of the CD drive.

Is my hard drive dead? Or is it something else that could be fixed without changing my hard drive?

Thank You.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Try taking the hard drive out and go into bios, set it to defaults. Then try putting the hard drive back in.

It will be similar to this:

^Load Setup Defaults

Tell us what you get

Edit: Welcome to TF as well!

 

[didibus]

I tried your suggestion, but it did not work. Same thing happens, bios loads and freezes at:

Pri Master : WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1 17.07W17
Ultra DMA Mode-2, S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status OK

Actually, its not frozen, it just hangs there, because I can ctrl+alt+del to reboot.

I did more tests on my own, so here's some more information:

1) I tried the hard-drive in another computer and it works perfectly.

2) I tried another hard-drive in this computer and it also works perfectly.

3) I tried putting it as master or slave, did not do anything.

4) I tried installing windows 7 onto the hard-drive from another computer and then put it back in this computer, but that did not work also.

So, I'm really confused here. All these tests were done with IDE hard-drives and the hard-drive that does not work in the computer is also a IDE hard-drive. What's going on here?

SOLVED!

I solved the problem. Solution was to connect the hard-drive to another computer and delete all of its partitions. Then when I put it back into the computer it worked.

My intuition is that, my BIOS has a bug where if there is non formated partition and a formated partition on a disk it misbehave like it was doing. Why I believe this, its because the same thing happens when I connect my external hard-drive. Which is only one huge NTFS partition with no boot sector on it. So I don't know exactly what the BIOS is doing wrong, but it has something to do with partitions.

BIOS version is AMIBIOS revision 1007 for P4P800 SE motherboard.

Thanks for all the people who tried to help me.