bios issues

[Red_Earth]

I have an hp pavilion elite running win7. I ran out of space on my C drive and I wanted to add a 300 Gig Seagate. I couldnt get my computer to recognize the drive. My friend came over to fix it. He made some changes to my bios that led me to a blue screen of death. I can't afford to go get it fixed and am not incredibly saavy myself. Is there any help I can get on this site for this kind of problem? This site has been really helpful in removing malware for me, but I have never seen this kind of issue on this site.

[shelf life]

Unless you have already you may want to: remove the drive you added and see if the computer will boot up normally.
With the new drive out, back in the BIOS you may find options to reset back to factory defaults or setup defaults etc. Then probably F10 to save and exit the defaults and reboot.
Another method would be to clear the settings using the clear CMOS jumpers on the board itself.

But, with all that said commercially purchased machines may use a custom BIOS and you may not see a reset option, so before you do anything you should visit the HP support site to clarify how to proceed. Most have good information, guides etc and support forums.

[Red_Earth]

I did remove the drive and try again, but it seems to not understand how to boot from the c drive anymore. He did something like trying to remap the sata ports, or something about making all the drives behave as one, his attempt was to trick the computer into recognizing my foreign drive. When his attempts failed he couldnt get the computer to go back to normal. I put win7 on the 300 gig drive to try to get my old c drive to register and that worked, except when my old c drive would show up as d drive I would go inot it and none of my content was available. empty folders. I dont believe my drive is wiped because it reads as having content.I just dont know how to access it. I search my computer for stuff i know is there and there is empty folders. I will do a little more digging, but I had done some before I posted. Thank you for your help.

[Red_Earth]

I believe something called Striping was done to my drive because when I try to boot from disk in bios it says "stripe" in the description of My c drive. I am not sure exactly what that is or does.

[shelf life]

Sounds like a RAID configuration was set up when the second drive was added.
Stripping is a possible RAID function that can be set up with multiply drives.
I would think turning RAID off or resetting the BIOs back to its defaults would help. Take a look here. (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/searchResults?tmp_product=HP+Pavilion+Elite+m9417c+Desktop+PC&product=3825415&tmp_qt=BIOS&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&submit=)

m9417c Desktop PC may not be your exact model number but you can change that as well as the key word to search by. Wouldnt hurt to poke around the HP support site or its forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com/) either before diving in.

[Red_Earth]

I believe you are right about the raid because it says so in my bios. I did the CMOS jumper moves, and it did not change anything. I looked hard and could not find a bios default settings restore. I could only find a set bios default setting. mine is the e9120y. ill check your suggested sites and see if I can come up with something.

[Red_Earth]

Okay, I have a better understanding of raid and sata now. I found the issue I am having in the troubleshooter you suggested. It said if you are having error message "stop 0x0000007B" then I am to "click here" for an automatic fix. I click there and immediately download an executable file from microsoft. what am I supposed to do with the .exe? Because I am obviously not on the computer that is going to the blue screen of death.

[shelf life]

Did you get the "fix" to download from here? (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/searchResults?tmp_product=HP+Pavilion+Elite+e9120y+Desktop+PC&product=3970023&tmp_qt=stop+0x0000007B&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&submit=) Its going to be alittle difficult applying the fix if you cant boot into Windows.
If you look here (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bph07110&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&product=3970023&tmp_track_link=ot_search#N174) you will see a topic for resetting the BIOS defaults based on what version you have, but this may not be necessary.
Before you go any farther I suggest you post in the HP support site. There are people there who can help you better than myself. Could be a simple solution.

[Red_Earth]

This has become a real problem. I got mini tool partition recover to scan and allow me to copy some important files over to another drive. I then formatted both partitions of the Terabyte drive. I put a legit copy of Win7 home premium on it. NO other drives hooked up. My drive is still a stripe. It is slow. It behaves like I have not seen it do before. I dont know what to do. My bluray drive doesnt show up either. NO help ever came on the hp site. and nothing i have found has gotten me back to where I have ever been. I dont care about the info any more i just want my computer back.

[shelf life]

The tetrabyte drive, thats the original drive that came with the machine? You still cant boot into Windows then? Try booting into safe mode: To reach safe mode you would tap the f8 key during a computer restart. Chose the first option from the list; safe mode. Worth a try anyway.
No response from HP. I will try to help but Iam no RAID expert. I dont think disabling it in the BIOS will have any affect now as RAID configurations require 2 HD's.
The person that set it up, do you know if they loaded a driver?