This is a bit of a strange one. I removed a secondary HD (slave) to replace it another spare to copy some data from my main drive. This worked fine and I plugged the drives back in the way they were originally. However, now the BIOS gets stuck. Sometimes when I turn the PC on I get a blank screen and no beeps - nothing! Other times the BIOS screen will load and it will detect my devices and then make a tiny (only just audible beep), although it will do it very slowly. Then it complains of a missing floppy drive and a complaint about MOS settings and says its loaded the defaults. However, it simply hangs here and I have to turn it off. I can't even get into the BIOS screen as the keyboard refuses to work, even though it lights up at the beginning.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

have you got the jumpers set correctly on the drives?

if it will run with just the 1 hard drive get into the BIOS and have a look at the settings

I checked the jumper settings, the only drive plugged in is set to Master. However, it still does not let me into BIOS even without a drive plugged in, as I reckon if i can get into the bios then i can resolve it. Also, the keyboard still does not work (although it worked once, and unfortunately once only, it now seems to be dead).

I'm wondering if the battery could be the cause as I've heard this can cause weird things to happen in regards to the BIOS. Other than that what about resetting the BIOS, if so does anyone know how to do that?

Its just strange that sometimes a blank screen will appear, i.e. the monitor will not come on, other times it will get to the second BIOS screen and freeze which indicates that at least the CPU is ok, as is the memory. Also, the power supply is ok, as all the fans etc work and sound healthy.

No capacitors have visibly burnt or anything either.

removing all the power connectin to the motherboard and removing the battery for about 10 minutes should reset the BIOS.

the battery is normaly a button cell cost about £2.00

is the keyboard a ps2 or USB type, have you another keyboard to try?

The keyboard is standard ps2 as is the mouse. I have a USB keyboard somewhere that I can try though so i'll see if that makes a difference before I try resetting the BIOS. Thanks for your help brain_dammage - I'll post back when I've done it and let you know the outcome when i can get back to a working pc!