Help! Have I Erased My Bios?
 

I am running Slackware 9.1 with Dropline Gnome 2.6. Everything was working great as I´d just got the mouse scroll wheel working & started ripping my DVDs to .avi´s

Then I thought I would play around with ssh. Now I don´t really know what I´m doing here but I thought the best way to learn is to just mess around with it. I logged in over a local network from my iBook running osX - browsed a few files, cd´d to my /Pictures directory then sent the command ¨reboot¨

The Slackware machine shutdown and proceeded to reboot - only I was now greated with a splash screen for the Gigabite mobo, then an instruction to insert disk in A and press any key.

I can still boot from flopppy - but what have I done to the HD and how can I fix this.

Any comments welcome

if you had erased your bios, it wouldn't boot to a gigabit splash screen. Since you didn't give us any other information (about mobo type) I would suggest parsing your motherboard options to stop having that screen show up. (possibly check boot order etc) Who knows. Test some more and then provide us with some more bugtracking information.

MOMO is Gigabyte GA-7IXE
AMD 751/756 chipset

I can´t seem to acess any bios setting to change the boot order - it just tells me to insert ... brb


just going to restart to check what it says again...

edit:

This is the message I was getting
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Boot Failure
Insert BOOT diskette in A:
Press any key when ready_

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Turns out hitting delete did get me into the BIOS but there was no option for it as there usually is. I went into the the boot order and it had changed to just allowing floppy booting. I changed a few things around and the system is booting from the hard drive again.

I still get the Gigabyte spalsh screen on restart with no system info other than that of my graphics card. It looks like the BOIS reset to default.

Should shutting down remotely as I did do this? could the battery on the mobo be running out?

Any ideas anyone? I would like to know what happened even though itś not that urgent now as the system is booting from HD again

Sounds like a bios battery issue. Your bios should not reset back to default upon reboot.

Thanks for your help.

I´ll be keeping an eye on it to see if it happens again. I´ve been reading the MOBO manual (which isn´t very helpful) and apparently the setting didn´t return to default - just some random settings.

Either way I´ll be leaving ssh alone for a bit

Thats strange. A dead BIOS battery should not give you any problems. Usually motherboards uses the standby current to keep the BIOS data refresh. If there is no standby current the motherboard should then use the battery. The flash chip that your motherboard was using may had a glitched, so it switched to the backup.

You may want to use "nohup reboot" next time.