A couple of basic(I hope) questions about BIOS settings

I have an ASUS A8Ne board that accepts up to 4 SATA harddrives, and it can also handle up to 4 EIDE devices on two IDE channels.
Right now I have 2 SATA drives, 2 EIDE harddrives, and 2 EIDE DVD drives.
I looked into the BIOS setup to disable the floppy drive which I had enabled while trying to use Norton Ghost to clone my SATA drives. While in there, I noticed that HDD SMART Monitoring was disabled. Is this as it should be?
Also, on another page AMD K8 Cool 'n Quiet Control was Disabled. Should I enable it?
A different subject: Before I installed the 150 SATA harddrive, I had Windows XP on the 74gig Harddrive, and had VISTA on the 120gig EIDE. This is unchanged. However, if I booted the computer, it used to boot into the 120gig EIDE, so that VISTA came up. If I wanted to boot into XP, I had to press F8 and then select the 74 gig SATA drive. Now, after having installed the 150 gig SATA(which is a clone of the 74gig), the computer defaults to the 150, and XP comes up. For me to access VISTA, I now have to press F8 and select the 120gig EIDE drive. This is not a problem as I prefer WinXP. I just wonder how that happened and if it portends trouble down the road.

 

Enable it if you would like. Just think that it may be disabled for a reason. Test your system. Disable it again if there there seems to be any problems.

Cool 'n Quiet is an "add-on ", it may be beneficial or it may clash with something else you have installed already, just use caution (my opinion). Read about "C 'n Q" in the motherboard manual. I think you enable it yourself.

I don't know of pressing F8 to select a boot OS system, that is generally when you might need to go into an "optional" boot system, like Safe Mode. You may have a problem with the boot files.

Matt

 

Thanks for the replies. My drives are in fine condition. The computer I use was purchased used, and though the components have been changed around a good bit, it has always performed just fine, so that I had rarely had a need to get into the BIOS. Guess I'll enable both SMART and cool and quiet.
Hitting F8 during POST gets you a menu of available drives connected to the computer. If you hit F8 after the initial Windows Logo comes up, that's when you get those options to go into SAFE MODE, etc.
Thanks again.

 

I take it that the boot option is not controlled by Windows and I expect it controlled by the BIOS (or it was set in the BIOS). In the BIOS "Startup Options" there is probably the option to boot from HDD 0, HDD 1, HDD 2, etc. It has probably reverted to using HDD 0, so you will need to change the sequence to HDD 1 first. If it keeps reverting back to default settings you will probably need to change the CMOS battery.

Personally, I leave SMART and Cool 'n Quiet disabled. If SMART finds an error condition, it is supposed to give you an error message. Quite a few times I have found that the system just stops (blank screen) and it is not until the HDD testing utilities are used that it is found that SMART was causing the system to stop. I back up my data, the HDD can fail without any warning from SMART anyway. If Cool 'n Quiet should not work perfectly, it could lead you to believe the motherboard is faulty.

Matt

 

I agree, Matt. Since my computer has been running as flawlessly(relatively speaking) as it has, I should not fix what isn't broken. The two important harddrives are warrantied till 2011 and 2013, and if I lose one of the Caviars, it really won't matter. Also, I have plenty of margin of safety wrt demands placed on the power supply, the box is clean and dust-free, and though not perfectly silent, as close as I can expect, I'll just move on to newer and different challenges.
Thanks.

 

It made me think that being able to disable Cool 'n Quiet is a good thing. Intel computers have (had?) "Thermal Throttling" and it could not be disabled. If there were any problems apparently associated with it, you could not disable it for testing. At least you can disable Cool 'n Quiet.

Matt