The BIOS is built-in software which is typically placed in the ROM chip of your computer. On a PC, the BIOS contains the codes required to control such things such as your keyboard, disk drivers and communication ports. The BIOS also loads the operating system of your computer. You will need to enter the BIOS in order to change/verify low level system settings.
A BIOS will also have a user interface (or UI for short). Typically this is a menu system accessed by pressing a certain key ( DEL-F2-F10-F8-ESC) on the keyboard when the PC starts. The easiest way to learn how to enter your computer's BIOS is to restart your computer and look very carefully at your computer's Boot/Splash screen when it first starts up. There is usually directions on this screen to enter to BIOS -- look for something to the effect of, "Press Esc to enter Setup" -- here Esc is how you enter to BIOS. You must be quick; as soon as this screen passes you have lost your opportunity. In the BIOS UI, a user can:
Boot Order-
When your computer starts up it looks at devices to see if they contain system software (such as DOS, Windows, or Linux). You may have noticed that when your computer starts the lights on your floppy drive or CD may flash -- this indicates that your computer is looking at them -- before it loads into your OS. The reason why it looks at these devices is because your the settings in your BIOS tell your computer to do so. In your BIOS you could change these settings so that it always looks at your hard drive first (improved boot time and better for security -- someone cannot bypass your Windows password by booting with a floppy), or to look at your hard drive last.
Integrated Peripherals-
Currently, most proprietary machines have many built in peripherals such as a sound, video, NIC, or controller cards. At some point in time you may wish to upgrade these components. In order to conserve system resources, and to avoid potential conflicts you will have to disable those devices in your BIOS.
The PC Health menu
will provide you with readouts of temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. You will be able to set temperature warning thresholds and warnings to indicate if a fan stops working.
Some motherboards will also have settings for adjusting fan speeds depending on certain temperatures inorder to make the PC quieter when not running at full speed.
Setting up RAID-
In order to use a RAID array you must first create it in the RAID utility. This is separate to the BIOS and the screen that prompts you to open this utility will usually follow the POST or motherboard logo screen after you have switched on your computer.
You will be prompted to pres a key combination (for example ctrl + i) in order to enter the setup utility. On entering it will list any existing arrays and will give you a small number of options, usually 'Create RAID volume', 'Delete RAID Volume' and 'Exit'. It should be pretty self explanatory what these options are. Once you go to create RAID volume you will be given the options to add disks to the array and the type of array you would like (eg. stripe (0), mirror (1), Stripe with parity (5) etc.).
Once set up the array will be usable as a single unit so that you can install the OS onto it or just use it for data storage.
The BIOS provides a small library of basic input/output functions used to operate and control the peripherals such as the keyboard, text display functions and so forth, and these software library functions are callable by external software. In the IBM PC and AT, certain peripheral cards such as hard-drive controllers and video display adapters carried their own BIOS extension ROM, which provided additional functionality. Operating systems and executive software, designed to supersede this basic firmware functionality, will provide replacement software interfaces to applications.
The role of the BIOS has changed over time; today BIOS is a legacy system, superseded by the more complex Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), but BIOS remains in widespread use, and EFI booting has only been supported in 64-bit x86 Windows since 2008. BIOS is primarily associated with the 16-bit, 32-bit, and the beginning of the 64-bit architecture eras, while EFI is used for some newer 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. Today BIOS is primarily used for booting a system, and for certain additional features such as power management (ACPI), video initialization (in X.org); but otherwise is not used during the ordinary running of a system, while in early systems (particularly in the 16-bit era), BIOS was used for hardware access – operating systems (notably MS-DOS) would call the BIOS rather than directly accessing the hardware. In the 32-bit era and later, operating systems instead generally directly accessed the hardware using their own device drivers. However, the distinction between BIOS and EFI is rarely made in terminology by the average computer user, making BIOS a catch-all term for both systems.
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