Motherboard RMA problems

[Patt]

I have an ASUS A7N8X - Deluxe motherboard. The other day, well, two weeks ago actually, it bombed out, and wouldn't POST at all. In an attempt to fix the problem myself, I flipped the jumpers to reset the BIOS to the factory defaults. Still didn't work.

I take the board into the store I bought it from, and they send it out on RMA. Fair enough. A week of delays, and finally I get a call from the store telling me that they won't RMA the board, that I corrupted the BIOS when I attempted to set it back to the factory defaults. Is this possible/common?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Yeah, it's not unheard of at least. I did the same thing to my Abit NF7-S 2.0 a little over two years ago, never did figure out how. But the BIOS was corrupted and I ended up buying a new BIOS chip from some company and swapping it out. IIRC it was semi-common on nForce2 boards.

 

[Patt]

I was wondering how they repaired the BIOS then ... with a new BIOS chip?

So when I go to the ASUS site, and read that there are BIOS updates available for my board, I shouldn't try them because they void my warranty? I'm confused 😕

 

[SynthDude2001]

I assume that they swapped in a new BIOS chip, yeah. Or they may have just reflashed your chip outside of the board. (When I got my new chip, I booted the computer up, then swapped in the old corrupted chip just to reflash it so I'd have two good chips.)

Updating the BIOS shouldn't void your warranty though. I don't really know why, but like I said, I think that this might have been somewhat of a common problem on nForce2 boards, that they'd sometimes be prone to random BIOS corruption in certain settings. I never did figure out what specifically caused mine, but I did call Abit once and the guy did seem to know what I was talking about with the BIOS corruption (even though his English was pretty bad😛)...