In the garden, and RAIN!!!!
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, December 25, 2025 04:27
VIEWED: 1005090
PAGE 324 of 1154
Hrmmmmmmm...
Yeah. Dunno if the idea to make a set of keys to start my computer is going to work. It would be fine for the purposes of what the guy who designed it to do needed, but my problem is that my BIOS simply can't boot from the drive at all. It's as if the BIOS knows that it is attached, but beyond being able to read the serial number and run a SMART test on it, it doesn't know what to do with it.
Using a BCDEDIT command, I was able to verify that my boot manager setups that I put on both a thumb drive and an SD card are correctly pointing to "D:\Windows\System32\winlogin.exe" (or whichever "win" file it is supposed to... I think that's it).
But it seems that beyond realizing that this is a hard disk, the BIOS on this old motherboard doesn't know how to recognize any file systems or partitions at it at all, no matter if I use the new GPT file system or the old MBR file system.
I think the reason that I'm able to use it as a spare external thumb drive and even boot to Safe Mode in Windows when it's attached to the USB is because the USB drivers are are a lot "smarter" and versatile when it comes to handling newer technology than whatever old SATA capabilities the mobo has (I'm assuming the drivers are only SATA I, and could not handle SSD drives that utilize SATA II or III).
So... to make an analogy of it... It's like I cut myself two spare remote entry keys, but without my GPS they're not going to do me any good since I have no idea where I parked my car. 
The only way to turn the GPS on with this computer seems to either be by using an extremely old and outdated mechanical hard drive, or to feed it through a slow USB2.0 bottleneck that would probably be even slower than using the old hard drive directly connected to the SATA I on the mobo.
Oh well...
From what I read, I wasn't going to be getting the blazing fast speeds that a SATA III SSD drive is capable of with the SATA I system in place anyhow. It probably would have been faster than what I'm working with, but I was never going to see a 5 second boot to Windows with it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Alright. For real. Giving up now.
I learned a lot. I can initialize, format, and resize and change the tables from MBR to GPT without losing data on a command line level now, as well as do a lot of diagnostics I didn't know how to do before. Switching from GPT back to MBR without data loss is dependent on 3rd party software, but is still easy to do.
Pretty sure that there's no fix for this though unless I learned how to hack the BIOS. That's never going to happen... I'm sure nobody else has bothered hacking that very specific BIOS before, so there would be no roadmap for me to even begin, and the amount of time it would take me to learn and to do it would be enough for me to replace that computer at least 10 times over just working minimum wage.
Going to order that case and see if the software from the manufacturer works on it and yields any better results. Very doubtful, but I'll just use the drive for network storage attached to the router if that's the case. If anybody is getting rid of a laptop in the future that was made after 2010, I'll be able to use that drive to make it much faster.
The computer works really well now anyway with the new fan in there. It's almost silent and the performance is loads better. One thing I will do in the next day or two before closing it back up is clone the drive to the larger and newer laptop drive from my grandmas old laptop that doesn't have any SMART errors. The drive I'm using doesn't even mention if it's 5,400RPM or not. It might not even be that fast. I might eek more speed out of this thing just from having the newer mechanical drive in there.
If I want to replace it with a similar unit in the future, I found out that I can order one with twice the power and speed for only $400 to $600. If I ever win the lotto, I could dump $2000 on one that would blow away anything I've ever owned.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Well, this is probably not what you're talking about but, don't you have the option (perhaps F2) to get into the BIOS on boot-up? If it would take too long to tell me why not, just say no - it doesn't work that way. HA hA!
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Nah... I'm way beyond that.
F2 (or F10 in my case) gets you to the BIOS. ESC in my case loads the boot manager where you can choose what drive to boot from one single time instead of saving a permanent boot order in BIOS.
The problem is, that old computer has one of the simplest BIOS out there, even for its time, and it's extremely out of date in 2019. The newer desktop I put together around 6 or 7 years ago has an actual GUI that loads when you do it with buttons that you can click with your mouse and about 100 times more options including all sorts of overclocking settings that can be applied. The one on this touch screen computer looks like Word Perfect from the early 90's.
That's why I installed Vista on a separate drive to install the only upgrade to the BIOS, but whatever updates were applied in that version didn't fix my problem or offer me any new options in the menus.
My newer computer is loading UEFI and not BIOS. The differences are not small. I'd let myself fall so far behind in tech that I wasn't aware of that until now. Honestly, until this SSD, I never was using anything in my PC's that were a problem. The largest HDD that I ever used internally was only 2TB, which is the limit on what size drive BIOS can boot. I would have figured all of this out earlier if I had ever sprung for a 3 or 4 TB drive years back and was only getting 2.1TB to use after putting all that money down (these were prohibitively expensive for ANYBODY back when desktops were still regularly using BIOS).
Here's a good article on it:
https://www.howtogeek.com/56958/htg-explains-how-uefi-will-replace-the
-bios/
So... long story somewhat short, I'm glad I put myself in the position of trying to mix old technology with new technology again. It's always a good way of getting me up to speed with what is out there today.
I think rather than saying that "my" BIOS can't load this drive, it might be more accurate to say that this drive can't be loaded by ANY BIOS, and requires UEFI to boot.
I won't be 100% certain of that until the enclosure comes in and I can try using the manufacturer's software to clone the drive one last time. It may be possible that no matter how I attach the drive the manufacturer's software won't recognize the drive unless you're using a computer with UEFI. In that case, they probably don't even mention that tidbit because chances are pretty low that many people would do it, and like the article says, most manufacturers have continued to call the UEFI the BIOS to avoid confusion.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Oh... and it seems there was a marking on the old HDD that had some yellow alerts in SMART. It's only 4200RPM.
I haven't been able to look what the newer one is since I put it upside down before starting the cloning procedure last night, but I'll either see if I can find markings on it or just look up the drive on Google and get the specs. There's an extremely high chance that it's at least 5400RPM or possibly even 7200RPM.
That will give me a speed boost right there.
Plus, I was looking into ways to add speed by using an SD card as memory. Today this is hardly ever used because SDD drives are far faster at doing all of this than any SD or USB attachment could ever be, but along with Microsoft's own ReadyBoost technology, there are a few 3rd party programs that will attempt to use this flash media as an intermediary between the HDD and the computers actual memory.
With only 4GB available to me and no way to add any more, I just might get another 10% performance increase by doing this with an old SD card I don't really have any other use for. SD is perfect for this too because I won't be taking up a valuable USB slot with it, and I've been known to knock them out while putting a new one in or taking one out. This PC put them really close together in a spot that isn't exactly easy to get to with my big dumb fingers. 
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Snow didn't stay and we have rain again where I am.
Weather bad in the eastern US and Canada. Snow and icy rain making travel hazardous. There was a 30 car pile up outside Kingston Ontario because of heavy snow and such.
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Hey thanks Jack. I did look stuff up to get a flavor.
Personally I don't think BIOS was so broken it couldn't be fixed. And as I've read it looks to me like UEFI is a backdoor onto any system, because, supposedly, one can control a system from UEFI even without an OS (except Linux, which passes control on to the system only AFTER a Linux log-in).
Too much to think about. Brain goes ... boink.
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Hey Brenda
I don't know about now, but years back the only drivers who were more aggressive than the ones in Los Angeles were the ones in Ontario!
As polite as they are, the driving was like .... insane. I still see in my minds eye a highway with every lane chock-a-block full of cars going 75mph bumper to bumper. It was THE worst driving experience of my life! All these years later I still get the heebie-jeebies thinking about driving there!
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Hey thanks Jack. I did look stuff up to get a flavor.
Personally I don't think BIOS was so broken it couldn't be fixed. And as I've read it looks to me like UEFI is a backdoor onto any system, because, supposedly, one can control a system from UEFI even without an OS (except Linux, which passes control on to the system only AFTER a Linux log-in).
Too much to think about. Brain goes ... boink.
Well... I really don't know enough about it to have a very strong opinion. You're always going to open yourself up to potential hacking, whether you are behind the times with the tech or you're always up to date.
What is amazing when you think about it is that the UEFI that comes standard on most builds today is 16MB. That's eight times as large as the actual RAM I had in my first computer in the mid 90's that couldn't even run DOOM unless you bypassed Windows 3.1, and even then you'd only get the music and it wasn't enough memory to play the sound effects.
Essentially, I wasn't wrong in still thinking of the new UEFI as BIOS. Even the wikipedia article on it refers to it as the UEFI BIOS. I mean, it is the same thing in regards to the fact that it doesn't matter what OS you use, you're not going to be able to start it if you don't have one or the other.
I just have to laugh at how outdated my stuff is today. It's one thing to shun smartphones, but for about 15 years there I was building a new PC every 2 to 3 years tops. But these days I really don't have the need for the latest and greatest since I don't do any PC gaming, and the technology that's been around for the last 10 years (mostly) does everything I would ever need it to.
In the mean time, I'm here dicking around with an SSD/SATA drive that's too new for my current rig and hard drive SSD media is already outdated itself. It's pretty awesome that "harddrives" of the future are essentially going to be just chips socketed into your mobo like you would a stick of RAM. I can only imagine how impressed I would be by a state of the art rig today.
Down the road, with my project, I want to really get into some HD video creation. That's going to take a lot more resources than are at my disposal right now. I technically could do it, but with the volume of stuff I want to get done it would take me a million years with my current tech. But for emails, paying bills, youtube, streaming and just general web browsing, what I have now is fine. I just wish the touchscreen computer was a little bit faster is all. The desktop I have has a huge 100% aluminum case that seemed like a good idea years ago, but it's not very practical and I've got it tucked away in a room I don't use that often and it doesn't get a ton of use.
But like I said, if I want to spring around $600 or so in the future I can really get a nice upgrade to this thing that would allow for a SSD drive and it will be so fast compared to what I'm used to that I'd be thrilled with it. And the beauty of technology is the longer I wait the better the deal gets.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The cloned HD booted up without issue. But everything seems sluggish... I wonder why that would be? The new drive is 5400RPM, compared to the 4200RPM of the old drive. I've run a bunch of programs that were installed and everything starts, so it seems that the copy went off without a hitch.
One thing I did notice is that explorer seems somewhat unstable after the cloning. Twice now I had to kill the Explorer process when it hung after right clicking on a USB drive I was checking. Task Manager also shows anywhere from 90 to 100% Disk usage when the sluggishness happens, so the bottleneck is the drive itself it seems.
Now that I have my old drive in a protective case, I'm making a disk image of the setup to revert back to in the future. First I'm going to try to do a Windows Restart and see if that fixes it. If not, I might have to bite the bullet and just do a fresh install and then go through the arduous process of re-installing everything from scratch.
This might be a huge issue whenever I get back to one of my big projects, as I don't know how much of the program install handled various settings and how much work I did would be lost. But I feel safe doing it now since I have the old drive to revert back to as well as an ISO image of the current drive to clone to another drive at a later date.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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