The Role of BIOS

You may think that your PC really doesn’t roar to life until Windows loads. Actually, the PC has a lot of work to do to get to that moment, as you already learned in the section “What Happens When a PC Boots Up.” Then, as you’ll learn in a moment when reading about the role of the operating system, you’ll see that Windows takes over control of your PC once it does load.

So what controls the PC from that first push of the power button to the instant the hourglass on the desktop disappears? Something, after all, has to shepherd all those devices like your keyboard, display, and hard drive into service.

That something is the BIOS, located on a chip on the motherboard, that awakens when power is first supplied to the motherboard after the PC is switched on. Once awake, the BIOS performs an initial inventory of all hardware connected to the PC and manages routines that help bring the hardware online so that the PC bootup process runs smoothly and Windows can indeed load.

In the process of Windows loading, Windows looks to the BIOS for information about that hardware and divides it between the PNP vs. non-PNP hardware explained earlier in this chapter.

BIOS and How Hardware Connects to the PC

When you first install—or reinstall—a troubled device to a PC, the device first communicates with the BIOS, which has the job of fitting it into its master schedule of the other hardware resources.

If the BIOS for some reason—the BIOS has been corrupted, the motherboard is damaged, or the hardware is defective, for example—cannot see the device you’ve installed or doesn’t recognize the connection type the device is connected to, the device will not work. In this respect, the BIOS is the first hurdle you have to pass in working with your hardware.

However, BIOSes can be updated and repaired to help a device be recognized and properly installed. BIOS updating is often done through software specifically written for your motherboard and current BIOS type (more about this in Chapter 8, “When Upgrades Go Wrong”).

Becoming Familiar with Your BIOS

Make sure you become familiar with your BIOS, especially the settings you can enable/disable or alter within it, before you get too deeply into a situation that requires you to understand the BIOS.

The BIOS can only be accessed by you when the PC is first started. The initial bootup display includes a message stating something like

Press <this key> to enter Setup.

The exact key or combination of keys you need to press depends on the make and model of your PC. Often, this is the Delete key.

Once pressed, the system should bring up the BIOS configuration window, sometimes called CMOS Setup. Your available options depend on the make and age of your BIOS, but you should see a menu of categories like these:

Standard Settings  This category includes date and time settings, drives connected, and basic hardware found.

Advanced Settings  Advanced settings include whether to look at the floppy drive to see if a boot disk is present before booting off the hard drive, cache options, and memory tests.

Bus Settings  This category provides configurable options for tweaking performance regarding the hardware installed into the expansion bus slots.

Integrated Peripherals  This section contains information on whether certain hardware devices and connectors are enabled or disabled, including the USB controller, drive controllers, and the serial and parallel ports.

Power Management  This section contains options for setting or disabling power management features to reduce the power supplied to certain hardware components (monitor, drives, and so on) when the PC is not in active use.

You can use PC information sites such as PC Guide (www.pcguide.com) and PCMechanic (www.pcmechanic.com) to learn more about these BIOS options.

Warning 

Don’t change any of these settings until you become more familiar with what they are and what they do. When prompted, exit the BIOS without making any changes, and the PC will proceed with its usual startup.

Other Needed BIOS Information

Three important pieces of BIOS information are

  • your BIOS type

  • its unique identifier (known as the BIOS identifier string)

  • its version or date of release

This information is crucial for determining whether a BIOS update will help you overcome a particular problem you might encounter.

The easiest way to determine your BIOS information is to look in your PC documentation (where it may or may not be listed). If you bought your PC from a major PC manufacturer such as Dell, you can visit the manufacturer’s web site and look up this information by PC model. Calling the manufacturer’s support line is another way to get your BIOS information.

A third way is to look at the BIOS information as it’s displayed on your monitor right after the PC starts to boot and before Windows loads. The BIOS type (such as AMI, Award, or Phoenix), its date of release, and the very long BIOS identifier string are usually found there. But you may have to press the Pause key to slow down the display.

Once you have that information, you can visit an online resource site such as Motherboard.org (www.motherboard.org), plug that number into a manufacturer database, and retrieve more details about your BIOS and your motherboard. You can then go through your PC or motherboard manufacturer or through a specialty site like eSupport.com (www.mrbios.com) to determine whether a BIOS upgrade or fix is available for you, along with instructions for how to obtain and install it.

The Changing Role of BIOS

BIOS has always been a major determining factor in how well—or how poorly—a device works with a PC. However, this relationship is changing with the advent of Windows XP because Windows XP can perform some of the actual hardware configuration and setup itself. Let me explain with an example.

You may have noticed that Windows XP allows you to physically install a hard drive to a system and then Windows XP configures it and prepares it for use. This is a rather cool advancement because it saves some clunky interim steps. Earlier versions of Windows required you to do all these other steps between installing a new hard drive and first using it for Windows:

  1. Boot the system with a boot disk.

  2. Make sure the new drive is detected in BIOS.

  3. Format the new drive using the commands FORMAT <drive letter>: or FORMAT <drive letter>: /s to format a drive onto which an operating system would then be installed.

  4. Partition the new drive using the command FDISK <drive letter>: to create a primary partition for the operating system (if needed on the new drive) as well as additional partitions as needed.

  5. Install the operating system if this to be the primary hard drive or if you run more than one operating system on your PC.

As you can see, that’s a fair number of steps just to get a new drive ready. But Windows XP jumps in to wipe out the need for a boot disk since the XP CD is a boot disk (and its Recovery Console feature, discussed in Chapter 7, can help you post-install) and takes care of the obligatory BIOS detection (XP can work through or around this). Run Setup from the CD, and you have the option of installing XP directly to the new drive, while XP expedites the formatting and partitioning of the drive for you based on information you supply (for example, the size and number of partitions).

In this respect, Windows almost seems to be cutting out the middle man—the BIOS and old hardware prep methods—to make it faster and easier to install new components without great hardware expertise.



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

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