Looks like my mobo is toast

[TnT]

Worked last night, booted it up this morning and it beeped giving a "BIOS checksum error" and then rebooted immediately. Tried clearing the CMOS. Put my floppy drive back in and tried putting in a BIOS flash disk, but it wouldn't even load the floppy.

Anything else I can do or is it new mobo time? I was hoping not to by a new mobo until I could just replace everything and get a 64 bit system with PCI Express and all that jazz.

[The PIT]

ERm be careful.

Take everything else out bar the video card.

Load bios defaults after clearing the bios either by removing battery or resetting the jumper.

In theory the memory should bleep at you but you never know also power supply on the limits can give false readings.

[Wombat]

Although things can just stop working, they usually don't. Is there any sign of an electrical surge, or something that caused this?

[TnT]

Not that I know of. I turned off the computer normally last night at about 3:30 and went to bed. Woke up at 11 turned it on and went to the living room to turn on the TV to watch football. I didn't hear the beeping, but my roommate heard it and told me.

[Wombat]

Have you opened the case yet?

[TnT]

Yeah to plug in a floppy drive and reset the BIOS.

I found a post about a guy that had the same problem and he just bought a replacement BIOS from a 3rd party.

[agallag]

http://www.badflash.com

I bought a replacement bios chip after flashing from a floppy with a bad sector. I don't recommend flashing your bios that way , but I do recommend buying from badflash.com. Great service.

[TnT]

So, after 8 months without my own computer at home, I decided to order a BIOS chip from badflash.com. Got it in 4 days, plugged it in and my computer is up and running again just like how I left it.

Only problem is that my USB is wacky. It seems to load fine in Linux, but, for a while, when I plug in a mouse or my camera it gives this message in dmesg:
ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.2: wakeup
hub 1-0:1.0: Cannot enable port 1. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

After some jiggering with USB settings in the BIOS (enabling / disabling) I got it to detect my MX700 receiver. The mouse goes crazy though. It moves around without setting of clicking and a cat of /dev/input/mice shows a lot of activity

Has the USB on my board gone bad? It's a K7S6A running the latest BIOS.

[Jon P. Inghram]

The mobo might actually be bad too and the BIOS getting corrupted was just a symptom. Is that the USB port that's on the actual motherboard or seperate? If it's seperate or a full-blown PCI card you might try disconnecting and reconnecting it to see if it just got unseated a little when you were working on the computer.

As far as doing dangerous stuff with BIOS's: On my TUSL2-C I used a BIOS hacking tool to copy a nifty tweak that some French programmers had made from an older BIOS into the newest one (and replace the EPA logo with a nuclear trefoil .) It keeps the BIOS from automaticly switching some chipset settings to low-performance values when you overclock. Everything seemed correct, and it flashed fine, then came the scary moment of rebooting to see if it really worked... which thankfully it did.

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm going to relate an experience I had some time ago with an Abit BH6 mainboard, re: a crapped out BIOS and fixing it. The symptoms were as stated above, came out of the blue and nothing I did could resurrect it.

I changed the battery, reset the BIOS and still no display at all. Of course without the BIOS floppy access seemed dead and the HDD's & CD's were useless.

Then it hit me: what if the graphics card (at the time a G450 eTV) wasn't responding because AGP wasn't accessible?

Hmmm....

On that tack I pulled the G-450 eTV and slapped in an old 1mb Micronix PCI display card. On power-up IT HAD A DISPLAY!

Not only that but there was now a prompt asking for a floppy containing a compatable BIOS.

HAPPY DAYS!!

I provided what it asked for and the BIOS was loaded from the floppy. After a power-down and restart the system came up normally.

Naturally I entered Setup and re-did my custom BIOS settings, but from then it worked for another 3 years in my wifes computer until it was replaced. I still have it as a backup.

Dr. Mordrid

[Kurt]

Even better days when you could put in an ISA VGA card in it when your PCI card didn't work

I wonder why they don't support VGA in the BIOS anymore?

[UtwigMU]

I plugged ISA video card in BX board once. It did post and show up video but it beeped about no videocard (it expected PCI or AGP) being present.

[cjolley]

Abit BH6

If there was a motherboard Hall of Fame that would be a founding member.

[Dr Mordrid]

And going in right with it would be the ASUS P3B-F

DAMN those things were nice....so much so at one time I had 7 editing systems armed with those things and never had a problem with any of 'em.

That's saying something when it comes to editing systems because they really get hammered to the limit....maybe even more so than with gaming.

Ahhhh....the good old days

In fact I still have one running in our son Eriks system (Erik's our 7 year old). Still runs like a top with minimal muss/fuss.

Dr. Mordrid

[Nowhere]

So what do you think about your current one?