could i have screwed the bios?

[mayday]

I have an msi nforce board that was working ok for a short time. I was in the bios and it froze. Now it will do nothing. I have tried clearing cmos, removing battery to no avail.

I have had this happen on other motherboards but it never caused anything this bad.


Any ideas?

 

[MacaroneePenguin]

Can you elaborate on "now it does nothing"?

Sometimes just taking out the battery does nothing to reset the CMOS. Some motherboards have a jumper to reset the CMOS and sometimes you have to manually short it out. Check your motherboard manual on how to do this. Try calling the motherboard manufacturer on that too.

 

[cholley]

i don't think you can scew up the bios unless you are flashing it
i would pull out all the cards and all but one stick of memory and see what you get

 

[yazz]

i bet your BIOS is corrupted. this can happen if you have a drop in power or massive surge. these MSI boards are rather resistant sometimes and you have a good chance in recovering. try this:

unplug your power cord from your computer. then move the clear CMOS jumer to clear. leave it in the clear position over night or for a few hours. after that, move the jumper back to its normal positon and if it comes backup load your BIOS defaults and make sure BIOS PROTECTION is DISABLED. have a boot disk with the lastest BIOS on it and flash it. When using latest 2.3 version of the BIOS make sure that after you flash it move the CLEAR CMOS jumper to CLEAR; unplug the power cord from the power supply and wait about a minute.

If you have access to another MSI Nforce board then try to hot flash your corrupted BIOS. when the other MSI board is booted with a DOS disk remove the current new BIOS in the board and put in your corrupted BIOS and proceed to flash it like above. once you are done doing that put back into your current board without a BIOS. But, before you do this go ahead and try the new board's BIOS chip in your old one.

There is also a rescue procedure in flashing an AWARD BIOS when the system does not post anymore. it is on the MSI site: www.msi.com.tw

if you cannot do that then take it back to the dealer you got it from and see if they can do a hot flash for you, swap out BIOS chips or a new board.

 

[mayday]

Yazz- I will try leaving it shorted for awhile and see if that does anything.



I did try shorting it using the jumper as well as the battery. Also it has no cards in it because it is an nforce board that has everything onboard. I did try a pci video card just for kick and nothing different happened.

When booting, it turns everything on and the hard drive revs up but there is never video and it just sits there.

The diag. lights are all red which in the manual says is a cpu problem but i know this cpu works. I have even swaped it out for another very carefully just to double check. Same problem, so i put it back in my other system and it works. It can't just be a cpu problem because it was working fine and just crashed in the middle of the bios screen.

 

[shathal]

Wow - this'd be the first "Frag BIOS by entering it" that I'd see ... impressive, were it not so sad

 

[mayday]

I called MSI. They are sending me another bios chip to put in for free. They were great about it. Cross your fingers.