Hi,

After years of upgrading and tinkering with my old desktop, I bought a 'new' one. 'New' as in assembled cheaply by my local computer shop from less than state of the art bits for £300.

The machine came with a smallish SSD so I've fitted the 1TB HDD from my old PC alongside. Installed Mint on the SSD and linked my Nextcloud directory on the HDD onto my desktop.

On the whole it works fine except the boot routine.

On boot I get something like 'Unable to find operating system'. If I tap f9 during boot I get a table of boot options and choosing SATA 0 (ie the SSD) makes it boot as expected. But obviously it's annoying.

f10 (I think) takes me into BIOS settings and it appears I can set boot order something I've done on various machines for donkey's years but on this one it doesn't stay in memory, on the next boot it once again cannot find the OS.

Also, I noticed the date/time settings keep going wrong. Usual cause of this is either corrupted CMOS settings or more likely a faulty mainboard battery. Either could also be preventing BIOS storing settings.

So off with the cover and look for the CMOS jumper. Can't find it. Can't find a decent hi res image of the board online and the instructions on the board manual tell you to move the jumper from pins 1 + 2 to 2+3 (which I knew) but not where it is. Near the battery is a 2 pin header with no label (could be a fan?) and a bit further away a multipin header but I can't make out what that's for, possibly USB? neither has any connectors or jumpers on.

So, next step, I removed the battery and tested it. 3.12V which is fine. Left out for a few minutes which should reset BIOS but it didn't cure the problem.

I've spent ages searching for info on this specific board with no luck. Can anyone help?

Details:

Mainboard MS-7778 VER 1.0

On boot I get an HP logo so I suspect the shop recycled it from an HP machine.

--

Phil