Hard disc failure?

Running Windows XP Home on an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe and an Athlon XP 3200 with XP on partition 'C' and Vista Beta on 'M'.

Last night, after spending several hours playing with Vista, I went to shut the machine down, got a black and white BIOS screen with the message "Primary slave hard disk failure ", and the machine froze so I powered down and went to bed.
This morning when I tried to boot into Windows XP, which is on the same HD but in a separate partition (C), I got the same problem and the machine froze on the BIOS screen. On to my Linux machine to order a new HD on-line when I realised that a slave HD failure should not stop a boot into the OS if the OS is on the Master HD.
It was the mother board battery which had run out of oomph!! This seems to be a very unusual way of indicating a battery failure to me, so I am posting this just in case it may help if the same thing happens to somebody else.
Roger

 

re

Strange stuff m8 never had a problem like that before myself. anyway you would be better testing out such things like vista or any untested new software on a virtual machine like vmware workstation so you cant cause any damage

 

You got me wrong. I wasn't trying to imply that Vista caused the problem, just pointing that a CMOS battery failure can give the wrong, and possibly costly, warnings. As a matter of fact Vista is working surprisingly well for a beta.

Roger

 

re

yeh I agree with that the latest beta worked like a charm but it takes up over 10 gig of hd. when its released it will be getting chopped down with nlite for sure

 

Hi Roger, check if the BIOS has a menu "Autodetect Hard Drives ". If the CMOS battery was dead you may need to run this before the drives are detected correctly. Dead battery...the settings would not be saved for the next boot.

Failure does not necessarily mean failure (uh? ). It may mean that the system cannot communicate with the drive.

If I spoke French you would say I was a failure too

Matt