Boot selector won't "remember" my choice of drive.

[eurosong]

I have a weird problem. For some reason, every time I (re)boot my machine, the boot selector refuses to remember which hard drive I have selected in order to be the boot device. Every time, I have to go into the boot menu and tell it.

I have an MSI K8N NVIDIA nForce 4 Ultra motherboard, with several hard drives attached. The drive on which my operating system is located is a SATA drive. The IDE Primary Master is an older IDE drive, from which I do not wish to boot (because my O/S isn't there).

If I boot the computer without touching anything, it will try to boot from the primary IDE master; and give me a message that there was a problem loading the operating system. Therefore I have to press F11 during the POST to go to the manual boot selector menu; go to "Hard drive"; then from the sub-menu, choose the relevant hard drive (the SATA). Then it boots just fine. However, the problem is that I have to do this EVERY time, and the choice of drive is not "remembered" for the future.

The problem started some months ago: prior to that, it was okay. I had bought my new SATA, and decided to do a clean install of Windows on that - and that was registered as the boot drive with no problems. But then one day, overnight, it stopped remembering that it should boot from the SATA. I made no changes to the configuration of my drives.

Can anyone shed any light on this? How do I get it to remember the setting? Thank you.

 

[donkey42]

sounds like a dead BIOS battery, is the date and time wrong too ?
if it is a dead battery, there easy a cheap enough to replace, just post if you dont know how

how old is the machine ?

 

[eurosong]

Thanks for your suggestion. However, I don't think it's the battery. All the other settings in the BIOS are remembered correctly; and the date/time is also remembered perfectly. I don't know if it's the actual BIOS anyway, because the BIOS boot device priority is remembered correctly as Floppy->CDROM->Hard Drive - and I never have to change this. The screen I have to keep changing is the Boot Selector (F11 from POST), which allows me to specify exactly which drive gets booted from (as opposed to pressing DEL to get into the wider BIOS settings).

I bought the motherboard in January, so it's pretty new.

 

[donkey42]

Thanks for your suggestion. However, I don't think it's the battery. All the other settings in the BIOS are remembered correctly; and the date/time is also remembered perfectly.

yeah, your right, sorry, it's not the battery, i can't think what it could be, i'll have a think and get back to you