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August 27th, 2004 16:00
ctrl key combinations in 4550 A08
What are the special cntrl key sequences that can be used in the IDE section of the 4550 A08 BIOS? The phone support guy had me enter ctrl-A and manybe ctrl-E. What do they do? What others are available?
I'm trying to figure out why both of my hard drives are not auto-discovered. I think one is dead, but the other should be fine. Will the failure of the primary cause auto-discovery of the secondary to fail?
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Majestic
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August 27th, 2004 22:00
Is it possible that he had you do the ALT + F ? This will force the BIOS to redetect the IDE drives and at the same time default all the BIOS settings back to their factory default settings. Here is the one I usually recommend for people with your model:
ALT + E will clear the NVRAM.
ALT + F will default the BIOS settings and redetect all the IDE drives.
ALT + B will save the changes and reboot the system.
If you feel that one of the hard drives is dead then why not disconnect it and then clear the NVRAM to see if it takes care of the problem on the next boot.
Message Edited by Majestic on 08-27-2004 06:14 PM
breco
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August 30th, 2004 10:00
Thanks for the detailed information about the key strokes. Yes, that is what they had me do.
It was a long weekend of testing primary and master IDE, cables, and drives, reinstalling software, etc. I think that alt-F, alt-E, alt-B with the 3 keyboard lights on was one thing that was preventing my earlier attempts from succeeding. The other thing was pretty obscure, or at least I think so. I had to disable the NIC and USB emulation in order to boot from a new hard drive that worked fine in another system. I never would have guessed that. Dell CS helped me figure that out.
Thanks!