This is the most commonly changed section of the CMOS setup. It controls the basic things such as system time, hard drive settings, floppy drive settings, etc.When you first go into your CMOS setup, this is usually the first option available to you. Hit Enter to go into “Standard CMOS Setup”.

Here’s a rundown of the options:

Date (mm:dd:yy):
Used to set the system date.

Time (hh:mm:ss)
Set the system clock. You may want to do this every once in a while. The system clock is not the most accurate clock in the world.

IDE Primary/Secondary Master/Slave
Usually, this will be a little table showing all installed IDE hard disks and their settings. Typically, these settings are all set to Auto, meaning the BIOS senses the settings automatically for you. In some BIOS, though, you may need to do this yourself. Three options are usually allowed. These are “Auto”, “User”, or “None”. “User” means that you will specify the hard disk settings yourself. “None” means that you are telling the computer there is no hard disk on that IDE channel.

Note: Since some knowledge of hard drive structure is needed to understand these settings, you can go to the hard drive section to find the info.

If set to “User”, the settings are:

• Size: Usually set automatically depending on the settings for heads, sectors, and cylinders.


• Cylinders: The number of cylinders on hard disk. Should be written on drive.


• Heads: Number of heads. Should be written on drive.


• Write precompensation:  Not much used on modern drives. It was used to accomodate drives that had the same number of sectors per track, including both the inner and outer tracks. On SCSI drives, set this to -1. On IDE drives, it is not necessary to worry about it as it will be determined automatically.


• Landing zone: Used for drives that don’t have auto-parking. All modern drives do, so just set to 0.


• Sector: Number of sectors per track. It’s often 17 for MFM drives, and 26 for RLL drives.

In almost all cases, you will not need to worry about these settings. Just use the auto-detect option to automatically set up the hard drive.

Floppy Drive A
Used to choose the type of floppy drive you are using for Drive A. The most common setting is 1.44M, 3.5″, but you should change it depending on your hardware.

Floppy Drive B
Same as Floppy Drive A. If you only have one floppy drive, set this setting to NONE.

Floppy 3-Mode Support
Tells the BIOS you are using a special type of floppy disk drive that supports 3 different modes: 740K, 1.2 MB, and 1.44 MB. This type of drive is used in Japan.

Primary Display / Video
Choose the type of video display adapter you use. Most commonly set to EGA/VGA. If you have two video cards, use the primary display to dictate this setting. There are also options for older video standards, but nobody uses this old hardware anymore.

Keyboard
If you do not have a keyboard installed, this option tells the BIOS to skip the keyboard test in the POST. This is useful for computers such as servers that may be booted without a keyboard.

Halt On
Tells the BIOS which errors to skip in the POST. For example, if you want the BIOS POST to continue whether or not it gets an error on a missing keyboard, set this to “All, but keyboard”. With this setting, you can dictate whether you see and acknowledge all errors, only some, or none, when it comes to BIOS and boot-up.