Cannot find Windows drive

[David Christensen]

On 03/09/2017 01:52 AM, Lars Eighner wrote:
> A lightning-related surge zapped the motherboard of my old SYX, but
> my whole life was in its hard drives (which were mirrors of each
> other except for fstab, so that either could be booted). So, I got
> something called an HP 8000 dual core tower refurbished by Joy
> Systems. It was supposed to come with Windows 7 biz on a 1 Tb drive
> -- and the drive is in there. So I installed my 2 1-Tb drives in its
> internal stack, having plenty of power and SATA plugs. I left the
> supposed Windows drive alone.
>
> I was concerned about how I would get to the FreeBSD drives if it
> booted in Windows, which is what I expected. But low and behold, it
> booted into FreeBSD. The old drives had 10.x AMD kernels and worlds,
> and they took off. I could boot to one or the other. But I cannot
> find the Windows drive. It does not seem to show up in /dev. And when
> I go to the BIOS set up, the BIOS does not seem to know of the
> existence of the Windows drives either. I checked that all of the
> SATAs are not hidden.
>
> bsdinstall only gives me a choice of the two known BSD drives -- I
> thought I could adjust the MBR to include Windows, but bsdinstall
> denies all knowledge of the third (original to the machine) drive. I
> tried to get into the Intel BIOS Management, but it wants a password
> -- I have no idea what. I suppose I should be happy to have my data
> back. But the missing drive is preying on my mind.
>
> What happened?

On 03/09/2017 05:46 PM, Quartz wrote:
> There should be a physical jumper or switch somewhere on the board
> that can forcibly reset the BIOS to factory defaults if you set it
> the right way at the right time; hunt down the board's manual for a
> step-by-step. Sometimes just pulling the battery for an hour will do
> it, depending on the BIOS and board.

+1


Then disconnect the BSD drives, connect the Windows drive to the first 
SATA port, and enter CMOS setup.  If BIOS sees the drive, try booting 
it.  If not, try other SATA ports, SATA cables, and/or power supply 
pigtails.  If none of that works, try moving the drive to another 
machine and check CMOS setup (but don't boot the drive).


David