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Dell BIOS nag screens after harddrive failure
Apologies, I'm not very good with tech speak.
I had a single OEM Seagate Barracuda SATA harddrive that failed while playing Skyrim. I ran checkdisk and it reported 5 bad clusters. It said it couldn't repair an active partition unless I rebooted, which I did. The damage apparently kept the drive from booting.
Next I tried some things with Startup Repair, none of which were succesful as it reported that repair wasn't possible and system restore bluescreened after circumventing the American Megatrends BIOS screen(no idea what the error message said).
Then I purchased a new Western Digital drive and installed Windows on it. I then used the application GetDataBack to extract all my old files to my new drive...then I formatted the damaged drive, elliminating the Dell recovery partition but leaving the OEM system partition, and ran checkdisk in full repair mode on the large main partition(it excluded 260 bad clusters from Windows).
Then I used Diskpart.exe in DOS to remove the OEM partition as I was prohibited from doing it in Administrative tools>Disk Management(after all this is Dell's computer, not mine, I guess). This seemed to remove a repetitious popup in Windows that kept warning me to backup this disk because it had errors.
Now the only problem I have left is that every time I boot I get the Dell BIOS American Megatrends nag screen. The only workaround I've found is to F2 into BIOS setup and exit...then it boots into windows. Although everything works properly if I disconnect the old damaged drive's cables.
I noticed in Disk Management that my new drive w/Operating System is listed as Drive 1, while the old (now storage) drive is listed as Drive 0. Is this causing problems with my boot order, or is there something else causing the nag screen and how do I stop it?
I realize this disk could well fail again, but that's not a primary consideration to me, as I'm only using it for redundant file backup. Thank you...
Last edited by Simulis; 29 Jun 2012 at 21:22.