Rearranged Bios

Hello folks, My wife's pc is running Windows XP and has a duel core Pentium D processor. About two weeks ago I installed a second 160G HD. The main 160G HD had a SATA cable connection and the second HD was set up for an ATA cable. The slave plug on the ATA cable connecting the DVD was open so that is where I put the drive. There was a working copy of Windows XP on the new HD so I went into the bios to change the boot priority to see if the new drive would boot. Short story, it wouldn't, so I changed the bios back to the way it was. She just wanted the extra drive for storage and being able to boot off of it was not an issue. This configuration worked great for two weeks. My wife called me yesterday, and this is where the story get a bit fuzzy. A friend of hers that was using the pc said that he smelled something burning as the pc shut down all by itself. When he tried to reboot, Windows said it needed to be activated, so he did a factory restore (I have no idea why). Come to find out he did do a factory restore, but on the second HD. When I figured out what he did I unplugged the second drive and rebooted. Everything was right back to the way it was before all of this began. Main issue solved with very little work, I was happy. I shut it down, plugged in the second HD, rebooted and went into the bios to changed the boot priority only to find now that the main HD is not even a boot choice while the second HD is plugged in. The only choices I have to boot while the second HD is plugged in is the second HD, the DVD, or a 3.5 floppy( which is not even plugged in) On the main screen of the bios it says that the ATA cabled drive is the primary master while the SATA cabled drive is the third primary master. A couple questions. Would restoring Windows change the bios in any way? If, let say the pc did overheat, could the bios be reset to factory defaults just from overheating? Why is the main SATA drive not a boot choice? (If the second ATA drive is not plugged in, the main SATA drive is listed as a boot choice)

I will try and stay with you through this, but my time and head are all over the place still (family stuff), but my greatest concern is the burning smell, this has me VERY worried, so before anything else I would strongly advise finding out more here, the main question I have is what kind of smell was this burning ? Should you have ever smelt electrical burning it is completely unmistakable, so much so even now days after the event if you were to put you're nose to the system you would still be able to smell it, so ask if it was really pungent, it would of stank the room\house out for hours if it is what I am fearing, and remove the PC from the wall plug and open the side of the case, smell inside, and smell in the vents of the PSU (where the mains cable plugs in), if at any time you smell this burnt smell I talk of then do NOT connect the mains back until we know more. Now while the side is off without touching anything look at the board, look for any signs of discolouration, blown resistors etc (where the ends of the parts soldered to the board have ballooned on the ends or similar), any such signs will say the motherboard is fried, and will need replacing, if the PSU has the smell I mention that will need replacing, and if it zapped the system it could of taken other parts with it, like the board, not sure if you have power\surge protection, but a UPS device, or surge protector at a minimum, reduces the risk of such events, and wise investments. Once we can clarify this burning smell we can move on, but until then I am concerned of the risk of fire, so do NOT connect the mains back to it until we have a better idea of what has happened for safety. As to the bios there are often 2 menus to look for, there is boot priority, where you stipulate the order it looks too what for booting, then there is drive priority, this tells it where you stipulate the hard drive as 1st boot device, this menu tells it which hard drive too look too for booting from, but lets see if we can see what went wrong first.

Thank you GUY for helping, please take your time, this is not a pressing issue so reply when you can. About a year ago, the pc started freezing soon after a cold boot. The interval between freezes got shorter and shorter. This is my wifes computer and she tends to only ask for help when it gets to the point of not working. When she finally ask for help it would run no more than about ten minutes before completely freezing up, alt-ctrl-del did nothing. I pulled the side off to find the heat sink on top of the cpu full of dust, you could not even tell it was a heat sink. In the process of cleaning it I did a few things wrong. First, after removing the heat sink I did not have any new heat sink paste to replace the old. Second, I replaced the fan backwards, the air flow was pushing air into the heat sink instead of pulling it away. Even with the errors I made the pc seemed to be working much better, the wife was happy so I was happy. A few weeks ago she said that the pc was starting to shut down again every once in a while, I assumed the heat sink needed to be cleaned again. After the initial heat problem I installed a program to monitor the CPU temp. I watched the temp fluctuate between 68c and 71c. Taking the side cover off drop the temp to 60c. As soon as my wife told me what happened a few days ago( the issue in my first post) I went to Radio Shack and bought the best silver paste they had. When I went to put the paste on, that is when I discovered I had put the fan on backwards. With new paste and and the fan pointed in the correct direction, the CPU temp went from 60c to 54c. I figured this is much better than 71c. When I was changing the paste I looked over the mother board rather well and did not see anything that appeared to be burnt. I also did not smell anything like burnt electronics while I was working on it. After the repairs it booted up (off the wrong drive, unplugging the second drive allowed the original to boot fine) and I've been monitoring the CPU temp. The pc very seldom get turned off, so it has been running for close to 48 hours with no freezes. If something got hot enough for him to smell it and also shut the pc down, I would think there would be some kind of evidence. The pc seems to be running with no noticeable problems, other than the CPU being a little warm. Once again the wife is happy so my life is back to normal I am curious as to what happened to the bios and why I can not boot with the same configuration that worked before my wifes friend did the factory restore on the second drive. The second drive came out of an E-Machine and has a separate partition with an original copy of the OS. Could doing a factory restore change the bios? Also another though, could I underclock to reduce the temp even further?

Right to make it easier for everyone (especially my head lol) lets take an issue at a time, it will make things easier IMHO.

The major concern was the burning smell you reported, I assume that the sort of pungent smell I feared is not present then ?
Assuming this is correct then that is a good thing, should this smell be there then there is a serious (possibly life threatening in the worst case) dangers, but a simple "hot" smell type "burning" is far less worrying, and from what I can see does start to suggest a dust\maintenance type issue, luckily this is easily sorted with care and common sense.

You have now gone back to what sounds like a similar occurrence to what you face now, assuming again the smell is not of the pungent type it does suggest a recurrence of the last time to some extent at least, so it sounds like a spring clean is well overdue lol, it sounds like you may have done this already, if not there are a few ways people approach this task, many promote the can of compressed air, great in theory, but I am concerned about blowing off loose connections\jumpers, so use with caution, also it's wise to do this outdoors, bit obvious to some, but my wife would slice and dice me if I did such a task indoors lol, the amount of dust can be overwhelming even in a fairly clean system (my wife has dust allergy's hence the caution lol).
Then you have the much safer gentle paint brush, where you physically brush the system off, the benefit is it's so gentle you're unlikely to disturb anything, but the draw back is the brush can't reach everywhere, but is great for delicate area's.
Hoovering is the option I use (along with the brush when needed), the benefit is I can do it indoors without risk of upsetting the wife lol, the downside is you could Hoover up loose parts\jumpers, a way to minimise this is stretch an old pair of tights over the nozzle, it will stop anything going up the pipe, but like the can of air it has to be used with caution.

Now assuming maintenance is complete, and all is clean, we can move on, to begin the removing of the side of the case, and the temp's and symptoms you mention certainly support an overheating issue, 70 degree's is my rule of thumb that something needs to be done, you're getting to the stage where you can damage the system, not that great at 70, but as you go over the risk grows, so this needs attention, even the lower temp you seem happy with is still high to me, and should be bettered if possible, 30 degrees is a very good temp to aim for, and achievable by most, but there are many elements to system temp's that affect this goal.

Arctic Silver is considered by most to be the best thermal paste, and it is highly advised to use a proper thermal grease remover, it is a liquid you use to clean the old paste off, it means the new paste can do a better job, there is a 2 bottle kit that has a cleaner and purifier to completely clean the grease off, putting the new grease on again has better way's than others, although there is not a single way all agree on, but for the most part the main points are agreed,
Main point is do NOT touch the surfaces when cleaned, and use a lint free cloth to clean, this avoids contaminants, the hardcore suggest putting some cling film over you're finger, and rubbing the thermal compound in first to help fill the voids (on both CPU and heatsink), even though it looks smooth, it will be filled with pits, so doing this helps fill those, next is use a credit card to spread an even layer over the surface area, some say just put a line up the middle, as to if a user notices the difference, I guess it depends on they're set up.

The fan is another arguable point, but I think you will find most will agree blowing ON to the heatsink is the better way to go, it's certainly the way I go, but you can easily test what is best for you by checking the temp after say 1 hour of use, then shut down, reverse the fan, and repeat, see which gives the best result in this case.

Factors that can vary the temp's, the case, this can make a massive difference, cable management, having them nice and tidy increases the air flow, all over the place they hinder it, dust and\or filters, the system needs to be clean, it is suggested to regularly clean out the case from dust, and check if the case has filters that these are cleaned often as well, air movement\heat, having GOOD fans in the right places helps move the air round the parts, and cools them down and removes the heat from the system.
Often people overlook having a fan on the hard drives, many cases have the provision for a fan in the front for the hard drives, but few include the fan, so see if you can add a fan there, it can make a large difference, if hard drives run too hot it affects performance, a lot, location, next to a heater does not help, and if on carpet it is best to place a piece of board under it, otherwise the carpet fibres\dust can block any bottom vents and suck in the fibres adding to the dust.

Now I fail to see how a factory reset can cause such a problem, but as I said my head is messed up and others may see something I don't, but too me once you set the bios options and save them, thats it, factory reset or not the system should do as instructed, so I repeat about checking the menu for both Drive priority as well as boot priority, it is the Drive priority that is the main one, but not all systems have this, but when they do, by setting the drive priority too the OS drive, tell the boot priority which hard drive too look too for the boot process, so check this.

Mixing Sata and ide drives is fine, although it can cause initial headaches getting the settings right, you say the hard drive is on the middle plug on the ide lead ?
This is for a slave, so the hard drive needs to have the jumper set to slave, or cable select (CS), some systems wont play nice with one or the other so see what works for you, newer boards only have 1 ide port these days, is this the case here ?
I am just wondering why you are sharing the optical drive that is all, another setting to check is to do with how the system handles the Sata ports, often you will find raid and ide as options, the other option AHCI is not used as much as not all systems\set up's can use it, check this is set to ide, logically the system should boot to the Sata drive set like this with the ide drive available for storage, does any of this help ?

Yes, that did help, I have something to look for now. I was not aware that you could change the drive priority as well as boot priority. I used the second position on the ATA cable because that was the only place I could put it. There was no other IDE sockets for another cable. I made sure the selector on the HD was set to 'cable select' and when I did the initial install, it worked just as I expected it to. I was curious to see if the second drive would boot so I changed the boot priority in the bios, it did not boot correctly, so I switched it back to the way it was, and it worked fine, for at least two weeks. It was also my opinion that a factory restore would not change anything in the bios, thats why I'm here (at WTT). I have never had a system overheat before so have no experience in this area. The friend that did the restore swears that he did not touch the bios, yet the bios has indeed changed. I read somewhere in the Pentium D specs that it has a some sort of safety that causes the CPU to shut down if it gets to hot (this explains the freezing). This got me to thinking that maybe if it got to hot the bios might restore to defaults. I'm grasping for ideas as to why it is now configured differently. As far as the high temps go, I may have put to much paste on the heat sink. I did buy the Arctic Silver 5 paste but my cleaning consisted of wiping the old paste off with a paper towel. I will get Arctic Clean and do it correctly. Thank you for all the help. I'm not near the pc in question so I will have to wait to check out the bios setting, I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks GUY I was able to find the drive priority setting in the bios and that did the trick. It will now boot off the main HD, with the second HD installed. About the heat issue, I went to Radio Shack to pick up the Arctic Silver Cleaner but they did not stock it in-store, it had to be ordered from their web site. The tech said I could use 91% rubbing alcohol that it would just take longer to clean. I cleaned both surfaces until the cotton Q-tip no longer turned black, as instructed, put it all back together, and watched the temp go back up to 62c idle. My wife has had this computer for a few years and it is time for a new one anyway, it wasn't even hard to talk her into a new one, lol. She's happy and I no longer have to worry about the heat issue. I'll install the SATA HD from the old one as a second HD in the new one and she will not even have to transfer any files. When the new pc is set up and running, I can then tinker with the old one to see if I can get the temp down, an interesting challenge to look forward to. Thanks again GUY

I'm really glad it was a simple fix for the system booting, I was hoping it was something pretty simple, if the hardware is working in it's own right there are not many reasons why such an issue can arise, and this is probably the most common one, which is good because it's so easy to sort, once you know to look out for it anyway, but not all systems have this option, so it's a case of seeing what you can see and go from there. The cleaning solution, yes many promote rubbing alcohol and get by fine with it, but my personal preference is the proper solution, once you see how easy it does the job, and just how much more the purifier gets off even after you have cleaned the grease off, you wont believe it until you see it, but removing the old grease allows the new grease to do the best job it can, so it's all good, not sure if this actually bettered the temp's you were getting prior to cleaning and reapplying the grease again ? Just wondering if it made a difference for you, but the temp is still quite high, and I can only assume that although we can certainly better it with getting a new heatsink and some better fans, I am getting the feeling the case is turning out to be a major factor in these high temp's, and the only way round that is to get a new case, so it sounds like a good time to go the upgrade route and start afresh, all new builds will have better airflow than the older systems, so you should win all round TBH. But overheating can most certainly freeze the entire system, and the usual indicators (without using software or access to the system as it wont stay on long enough) are if you can only turn it on after being off a while, if it runs better at night when it is cooler, and things like that, a temp approach is to remove the side of the case, and place a fan used for the house aimed into the case, but running without the side on is very risky, and should NEVER be done where animals or kids are not able to know to stay away, so should only be done in an environment where it is safe to do so, and a permanent solution found ASAP to get the side back on for safety reasons. My daughters Pentium D runs in the 30 degree range, but thats with an Antec 900 case with an aftermarket heatsink, and a fan that sounds like a jet engine lol, I aim to replace it with a similar but quieter fan one day, but should you ever look to buying a fan for replacing a broken, or lesser fan (most pre built systems use cheap fans more often than not in my experience), the 2 things to look for are CFM and db, the CFM is how much air the fan moves, the higher the number the better. There are some very good choices in the 60 ish range with a low db, now db is the noise level, the lower this number the better, the best fans I have seen push 60 ish CFM and run at about db or just under (my daughters is around 40db IIRC), this for most reasonable people is a very happy medium, you can hear the fan, but not at a level that you would really notice, not unless you want a whisper quiet system, and if thats the case then you will need a special PSU as well lol. You may want to consider upgrading you're own system one day, I suggest building you're own, you know you have got top spec parts throughout then, a store bought system uses good parts for "some" of it, but at a cost with the others, often highly underrated parts such as the PSU, the good thing with building you're own is you can get a bit at a time building it up at an affordable rate, get a good case, then a good PSU, both are essential to a smooth running system, and are a large part of the initial expense, but once you have these and the drives etc, the only things left are the board, ram and CPU, it makes upgrading cheaper in the long run as only these 3 parts would be needed, at least until the next leap in tech anyway lol, but takes a while to get there, hope this gives you some things to think about.