HP BIOS problem with A8AE-LE (Amberine)

[twcinnh]

I have an a1330n HP machine, Windows XP. The motherboard is made by ASUS for HP:
http://tinyurl.com/pvmw7

The problem is after adding a new Seagate PATA drive the system wants to boot from it, not the SATA drive that came with this machine. I can go into the Load Boot Module and select the drive to load from, but that is dynamic and won't allow me to save the boot sequence.

To do that I go into the BIOS setup routine to change the order of the drives. It won't let me do that. The menu is there, the instructions to do it are there, but it doesn't seem to have any code to accomplish the task.

HP (after GOD only knows how much time) are acknowledgeing there is a problem, send it back to them for 9 days and they'll fix it.

First, I can't do without the box for 9 days. And, I'd like them to tell me what they plan on doing. How do I know it's something I'd want? Don't need anymore lost functionality.

Do I have any alternatives, or is this just the consequences of buying HP? They say there are no BIOS upgrades to accomplish this. That's one reason I'd like to know what they'd do to fix the problem. If I could get it done locally that would solve my time problem.

Any thoughts, help etc. will be gratefully appreciated.

Regards,

Tom

PS I should add that from what I can find out, this is a proprietary motherboard HP had ASUS develop for them, so there is no help from ASUS.

[edwin]

You should be able to move the controllers up or down in the list, either with arrow keys or "u" and "d". It is not the drive sequence but the controller boot order you need to change, that's in a different area.

[twcinnh]

All I can say is I've been in the part of the BIOS where the instructions say use the + or - key to change the sequence of the hard drives.

That doesn't work. The + and - keys don't do anything. I'll try the u and d keys and see if they work.

Stand by.

Tom

[twcinnh]

I'm back. Nothing. It's just as if HP didn't link any code to the menu. Jeez, what do you save $.35 a machine.

Tom

[edwin]

Somehow some stuff is blocked. Maybe you need a setup password or Alt-F1 to enable some extra thingies. Sadly, I have no HP machine here to test on.