Martin wrote:
System Restore restores the operating system--Windows--and that's all. It
has nothing to do with data files, the BIOS, or anything else.
I don't know. What makes you think you need to restore it at all?
Ken
Ken,
I recently installed a second hard drive (hitachi deskstar 500 GB
sata-2) into my 1-year-old Dell Dimensioni 4600. Every time I boot up,
it hangs and says something like "drive 1, sata-2, not found, press F1
to continue or F2 to enter setup".
If I press F1 to continue, bootup proceeds normally. If I go into the
device manager, I see both drives and both are listed as "healthy" and
working properly. I can also write to and read from the new drive, but
it is about 5x slower than the boot drive.
But, if I press F2 to go into setup, and scroll down to the second sata
drive (sata-1), there is just a blank space for drive ID (instead of
the expected series of characters that represents make and model). And
I don't see any way to manually enter this information, apparently the
system must "discover" it.
Now here's the strange thing - If I do a system restore, and go back to
the day before the drive was installed, the bootup then procedes
normally. If I interrupt the bootup by pressing F2 to enter setup, and
look at the ID for the drive, now it appears to be entered properly!
And if I do another speed test, the new drive is now about equal in
speed to my boot drive.
Unfortunately, the "fix" only seems to last a few hours. Eventually
the boot hang-up reappears, I have to press F1 to continue, the drive
ID is lost from the setup, and the drive is 5X slower again. I have to
repeat a restore to 0ct 25 about once a session in order to keep things
working properly.
Martin
