On Saturday, August 15, 2015 at 6:28:06 PM UTC-5, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 15 Aug 2015 06:23:48 -0700 (PDT), Uncle
Monster wrote:

On Friday, August 14, 2015 at 7:23:49 PM UTC-5, Tony Hwang wrote:
Uncle Monster wrote:
On Friday, August 14, 2015 at 11:58:35 AM UTC-5, Snuffy Hub Cap McKinney wrote:
Pardon the cross-posting. win2000 newsgroup is practically dead.

What could have happened to cause this problem? Master and slave drives were switched without me doing anything.....

The system has Windows 2000 Prof. Today I shut down powered down the system as usual - Start Shut down, etc. The an hour later powered up.. When the first screen came up, I noticed the slave drive mfr/model was listed as master and vice versa. I let it start up as normal, and the desktop was like when first installed. Opened Windows Explorer and c: drive was in fact the former slave. Former master was now one of the other drive letters. All the other drives were there, but with different letters.

I also noticed something in the recycle bin - which is normally empty. It has a couple of backup folders that had been on the original master.. They were 1-2 GB each, and there's no way I would have deleted those accidentally. If they were deleted it would take a minute on this machine to go thru the deletion process. So I moved them back to a safe place on a drive.

Then I hit start shutdown restart. Hit DEL and sure enough they were showing up as being switched. I set it up to manually set them back, rebooted and all came up normally again.

Now all is back to normal.

I wonder if your Bios battery could be dead or dying. Something like that can cause computer dementia. Å»\_(?)_/Å»

[8~{} Uncle CPU Monster

How could he boot if that is the case?

Most computers I've dealt with will boot without a BIOS battery. It comes up in a default configuration with the date the BIOS was published. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle CPU Monster

Yes. The Mac 2, and maybe other macs?, is an exception to that rule.
Even though a moderately handy person can replace the soldered in bios
battery of a mac2 with a battery holder and a cheap-enough battery, I'll
bet most took it to a mac repairman and endured a high service bill.

Those lithium coin cell battery holders have the same lead locations as solder in lithium coin cells. I've installed many of them in all sorts of digital electronic equipment that has programmable features especially commercial electronic/digital telephone systems which have a much longer life cycle than a desktop or laptop computer and some of those phone systems can have been in service for 25 years after going through numerous battery replacements. (¬€¿Â¬)

[8~{} Uncle Coin Monster