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| Thread ID: 72840 | 2006-09-27 23:09:00 | BIOS failure | devolutionary (11218) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 487754 | 2006-09-27 23:09:00 | Howdy folks, On the advice of some others, I have been told to seek help outside my usual rabble of techies and self-taught geeks . In short, my BIOS is fried . I'm running on a Gigabyte board that has, previously, given me no issues . The computer worked Tuesday morning before work . Upon arrival from home, I turned it on to find it stating "Restoring Bios" . I let it run for a while, assuming that something must have shorted out at some point during the shut-down that morning . However, it just hung there, doing absolutely nothing . Eventually, I reset the computer . Now it will not do anything . Juice is flowing (the blinking lights and LCDs will attest to that) but there's nobody home . There is no monitor response, no loading of anything - in short, it's nicely dead . I tried the CMOS battery removal tricks, as well as shorting the pins in a last ditch attempt, all with no results . While I was looking at a new computer, I don't actually have the money to spare immediately, so fixing my current machine would be preferable . Any and all suggestions welcome . Cheers :) |
devolutionary (11218) | ||
| 487755 | 2006-09-27 23:12:00 | Hi mate, welcome to the forums. Please advise the Mobo Model, it might be a dual bios board with which we can restore from previous bios, or we will have to see if we can just flash the bios with a DOS boot disk! |
SolMiester (139) | ||
| 487756 | 2006-09-27 23:42:00 | Running from memory, it's a Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ. I'm at work (since no computer at home), but that seems the closest (and it's definitely the right socket for it). And by boot disk, I hope you don't mean floppy, because I don't have any such drive. I never thought I'd need one. All I have is my lowly CD-RW and a 80Gb Barracuda. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, it would seem. |
devolutionary (11218) | ||
| 487757 | 2006-09-28 04:53:00 | I have never found a computer that hasn't needed a floppy drive for something. You might as well buy or borrow one now because you may well need it as if that is your board (7VT600P-RZ) it doesn't have dual bios. | Agent_24 (57) | ||
| 487758 | 2006-09-28 06:18:00 | I have never found a computer that hasn't needed a floppy drive for something. You might as well buy or borrow one now because you may well need it as if that is your board (7VT600P-RZ) it doesn't have dual bios. If u have a USB flash disk, and its bootable, u dont need a floppy drive. You can boot off it ( thats if the BIOS supports booting from USB devices). |
Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 487759 | 2006-09-28 06:33:00 | Festina lente . Slow down, Speedy . :rolleyes: I have a nasty suspicion that if the BIOS is indeed defunct, the computer won't be able to boot from a floppy, nor a CD, nor a USB memory stick . :( Nothing happens unless there's some BIOS code . The CPU can only do what a programme held in memory tells it to do . That's what the BIOS is for . It provides initial programme load which used to be done with hardware switches . ;) |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 487760 | 2006-09-28 08:19:00 | The only BIOS recovery code I know of that can read from USB is Asus Crashfree Bios 3. Now I know a gigabyte board doesn't have that! Most bootblock recovery code only reads from a floppy disk, and sometimes maybe CD. When the main BIOS code is corrupted or flashed improperly you may see something like this: Award BootBlock BIOS v1.0 Copyright (c) 2000, Award Software, Inc. BIOS ROM checksum error Detecting floppy drive A media (This is likely something like what you saw when the computer said "Restoring BIOS") The bootblock code will usually attempt to read from the floppy drive and flash a new BIOS file, and hopefully fix any problems. The fact that you don't have a floppy drive may be why you get no positive result, but it may be just not initializing the video card. however the whole chip might be stuffed. If you discover that your BIOS is indeed stuffed, you could try this website pages.sbcglobal.net which gives information on how to recover an award BIOS that has this problem. If none of those work, hope that your BIOS chip is of the socketed type, as you could then order a new chip flashed with the appropriate BIOS for your motherboard. (maybe cheaper than buying a new mobo) (A socketed BIOS chip will look like this: upload.wikimedia.org) |
Agent_24 (57) | ||
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