I accidentally pressed the Clear CMOS button, and the computer rebooted. After taking around 10–15 minutes to start, Windows began behaving strangely: File Explorer would not open, although the browser, Steam, and other applications on the C: drive still worked. One of my other hard drives now appears as RAW, and Task Manager shows it running at 95–100% disk usage. When I disconnect that drive, the computer works normally; reconnecting it makes Explorer freeze and the disk usage spike again. Could the drive simply be taking time to finish being read, or is something else wrong?
3 Answers
Clearing CMOS normally only resets motherboard firmware settings; it does not erase or reformat Windows drives. However, it can reset storage settings such as AHCI or RAID, or change the boot-device order. Check those settings carefully, but do not initialize, format, or create a new partition on the RAW drive.
You can test the drive in another computer or with a USB-to-SATA adapter to see whether the same freezing happens there. If it remains RAW and causes systems to hang or reports severe SMART errors, stop trying to repair it in place and use a backup or professional recovery service. Also verify that the BIOS storage mode matches the setting Windows was installed with, such as AHCI versus RAID.
The symptoms point more toward a failing drive, cable, or connection than a disk that is merely taking a while to load. Try another SATA cable and motherboard port, then check the drive’s SMART health with a diagnostic tool. If the data matters, make a sector-by-sector image or recover the files before repeatedly powering the drive on.
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