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New computer crashed, now won't load BIOS

L

lolwot

Junior Member
While browsing the internet yesterday, my computer suddenly displayed a blue screen that said that it was shutting down to prevent damage, or something along those lines. Since then, I haven't been able to access the BIOS. The error code was initially 4 beeps, which should signify a system timer failure, but when I last tried to turn on the computer, it emitted 5 short beeps, which signifies a process failure.

The monitor displays text that says to insert a USB flash drive containing the BIOS file, but when I plugged in a flash drive with the correct BIOS file, it said that the file isn't recognized. Also, after a few cycles of 5 short beeps, the motherboard makes 2 long beeps. I've already tried reseating the RAM, removing and reinstalling the CMOS battery, and clearing the CMOS jumper, but none of that has worked. Is there any reason why my motherboard would fail so soon? It seemed to be fully operational for a couple weeks with no sign of any technical issues.

The internal components seem sufficiently cooled. the power supply has a 135 mm intake fan, the CPU and GPU both have 80 mm heatsink fans, and I installed a 120 mm exhaust fan on the case. As far as I know, the inside of the computer does not get exceptionally hot. And according to the software that came with the GPU, the graphics card temperature never went above ~50 degrees celcius.

To be more specific about the components of the computer, it has an MSI K9N6PGM2-V2 motherboard, an AMD Athlon II X2 245 CPU, a Kingston 1 GB RAM chip, and a Gigabyte GZ-PH2A3 case, all of which were assembled in a barebones system by Mwave. Also, I added an XFX Radeon HD 4770 graphics card, an LG 22x DVD RW burner, a Hitachi Deskstar 720 RPM 1 TB hard drive, a MassCool 120 MM exhaust fan, an OCZ 600MXSP power supply, and another 2 GB of RAM.
 
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Make sure you are using a FAT32 system on your USB stick with the bios file on it. I know that I had a problem updating my bios with a USB stick because it was in FAT format, not FAT32.

Just a suggestion.. other than that I'd say it sounds quite strange and you might have a motherboard replacement in the future.

I just find it strange how your computer is actually prompting you to insert a USB drive with the bios file on it, seems like something did happen to your bios most likely. You didn't download any suspicious files or anything? I'm pretty sure there are viruses/malicious programs that could screw with your bios.
 
The USB flash drive is using the FAT file system. Is there any way to change the file system to FAT32?
 
Yes, what you want to do is go into windows on another computer and right click the flash drive from the "My Computer" screen, select format, and then under file system type just select FAT32 and leave everything else default. After that, reload the driver file onto the USB drive and boot the broken computer back up with the USB drive attached. I'm hoping that works for you, I know my bios couldn't even find the update file until it was FAT32 format.
 
How old is your motherboard? I'd RMA that bitch. If it failed that quickly, I wouldn't even mess around with trying to fix it. There could be an underlying issue that caused this to happen that won't just go away when you re-flash the bios.
 
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