i somewhat talked about this in another forum, but it is probably better said here.

so i was given a hand me down computer(my family gives all of their old computers to me, im sure you all are in the same situation), and of course, immediately i want to install linux on it. well, i popped the cd in, changed the boot order, and then...nothing. the thing just booted windows again as normal. i tried changing everything in that boot order from cdrom to dvdrom to even floppy, and it will never boot from any of them.

the devices all work fine when windows boots up.

but i noticed something when it boots. at some point, it says "The BIOS is disabled".

can you really do that? can you disable the bios? it would explain why the drives are getting skipped over in the boot process. i did some looking around, and the motherboard is a Gigabyte KT133-GA7ZXE01-F. i tried to find the jumpers to flash the bios, but there are about 20 pairs of jumpers on this board, so i left those alone. i removed it from power and took the battery out, but that didnt do anything. i even tried downloading this software from Gigabyte that is supposed to update your bios, but it didnt work.

how can i get this thing up and running? do you guys have any suggestions? i would really appreciate it.

thanks

the bios is probably diable from somewhere inside setup. Search around and see if there is some disable option or something. Also see what happens when youtake out all drives except for cdrom. Does it boot from cd then. If it does try putting cd on primary IDE and harddrive on secondary.

Well, you have floppy. Smart Boot Manager

thank you.

i will check that out tonight. ive been trying to get my internet fixed for the past few days.

i had to reset my router and then realized i didnt have anything saved, so i had to go through and reconfigure everything.

ill let you know what, if anything, works.

thanks for the help.

jas

From what I know from A+, you cannot disable your motherboard bios. If you could, your computer would not even start up, as your BIOS plays a vital part in the Power On Self Test process. In fact, you can disable your bios, through updating the bios and then powering off during that update, but it permenately destroys your motherboard unless you've got a secondary bios for redundancy. It's possible that your CD-ROM drive's bios is disabled, and that's why it gives you that message. Other than that, I'm pretty positive that your motherboard bios is not disabled. Hope that helps narrow it down.

thanks. ive still yet to try the boot loader. i havent had time to get around to it.

we need 36 hour days.