[xaronax]

I am experiencing a problem attempting to boot my computer. I have XP Pro on my SCSI drive, which is connected to a PCI card. I am using two IDE HD's connected directly to the motherboard on the primary master and slave slots. Whenever I try to boot the system with any IDE hard drive (1, 2, on master cable, on slave cable, on cable select/master/slave, and even on the secondary cable.) The drives are detected, the SCSI powers up and detects that drive, and then i get a screen with nothing but "Press a key to reboot" at the top left. The system boots perfectly fine with no IDE drives connected, and I only experience this error about once a month, but once the error occurs, I cannot boot with the IDE drives connected for about a week, at which point i try them for the heck of it and they boot. Very strange. I have read every post I can find on the subject, and have tried making them non-booting drives, since they do not contain an OS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Asus P4TE mobo and 2 crappy 40 gig western digital drives. Any other specs available upon request.

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I think I might have figured it out. It appears my BIOS battery is dead, and when i leave the computer off it resets all of my BIOS settings, letting the IDE drives attempt to boot as OS drives. Hopefully i can find a battery for my ancient 6 year old motherboard on ebay or something. I will update if this doesn't work.

[xaronax]

I think I might have figured it out. It appears my BIOS battery is dead, and when i leave the computer off it resets all of my BIOS settings, letting the IDE drives attempt to boot as OS drives. Hopefully i can find a battery for my ancient 6 year old motherboard on ebay or something. I will update if this doesn't work.

[Neil Jones]

Pretty much all boards made in the last 15 years use standard size CMOS batteries, a CR3032 or a CR2032 (more likely the former than the latter). These are available for peanuts from everywhere. It's only a coin shaped little thing, bigger than the ones that power your wristwatch.