A very basic Drive v Windows v BIOS v ROM?

Markg2 · Thursday at 2:13 PM

When you turn on a computer and the screen result is (paraphrased) the drive is not present/gone/toast. Does that mean that any effort to do BIOS work is also not present? I thought the BIOS lived on the ROM which lives on the CPU which has nothing to do with the drive or Windows until the BIOS loads Windows. I'd be delighted for a link to the best tutorial on this. Thanks, Mark

pparks1 · Thursday at 2:16 PM

The BIOS is actually on the motherboard, not within the CPU.

The BIOS has to know the drive is connected and has to know which device to look on for the bootloader to begin loading windows.

hsehestedt · Thursday at 2:31 PM

Put another way, the BIOS is completely independant of any drives. You could disconnect all drives so that not a single drive is connected to the system, but you would still be able to access the BIOS without any difficulties whatsoever.

MisterEd · Thursday at 2:46 PM

The BIOS chip maintains it programming even without power but its contents can be overwritten with new versions.

Here is where the BIOS chip on my ASUS Prime X370-Pro motherboard is located:

BamaInArk · Thursday at 2:59 PM

During the power on cycle start hitting the F1 or F2 key(for Lenovo) to enter the bios.

Markg2 · Friday at 9:51 AM

v 23H2 - B 22631.3737
A reminder to a now completed thread that now prompted my revisiting the BIOS. In the previous thread no matter what valid option offered by the forum to access the BIOS on boot, the computer seemed to skip and open at the Macrium/Win11 option. The reason turned up on an archived Lenovo forum thread - I changed the monitor connection from Display Port to HDMI. Bam - solved.
The current problem is Macrium boot to rescue USB. I can reorder the boot to USB first or even second but once I remove the USB Flash drive and reboot the boot order falls back to its previous 'automatic' state. Apparently some computers allow for the boot order to be static once set but not ours.
So this was the reason for this thread's question. If Win11 will see the BIOS with a shot hard drive, then I could just insert the USB rescue, F2 to the BIOS, reset the boot order and boot to the Reflect WE.

MisterEd · Friday at 11:04 AM

Markg2 said:
v 23H2 - B 22631.3737
A reminder to a now completed thread that now prompted my revisiting the BIOS. In the previous thread no matter what valid option offered by the forum to access the BIOS on boot, the computer seemed to skip and open at the Macrium/Win11 option. The reason turned up on an archived Lenovo forum thread - I changed the monitor connection from Display Port to HDMI. Bam - solved.
The current problem is Macrium boot to rescue USB. I can reorder the boot to USB first or even second but once I remove the USB Flash drive and reboot the boot order falls back to its previous 'automatic' state. Apparently some computers allow for the boot order to be static once set but not ours.
So this was the reason for this thread's question. If Win11 will see the BIOS with a shot hard drive, then I could just insert the USB rescue, F2 to the BIOS, reset the boot order and boot to the Reflect WE.

There is a different key you press at bootup that takes you to a boot order menu. Unlike a change in the BIOS this change is only temporary. At the next boot the boot order reverts to that set in the BIOS.