Help! Bad bios flash?

[BBigJ]

Ok, I'm at a loss here. Brand new machine that was put together two days ago (barton 2500, soltek 75frn2, r9500pro...) and today we try to flash the bios. It doesn't have a floppy, so I make a bootable cd and flash the bios off the cd. The flash appears to go fine, and at the end it tells me to hit a key to finish. I do, and it goes to POST and then I get a blank screen with just the cursor flashing in the UL corner. So I hit reset and again, I get post followed by the single curser. The same thing happens, again, and again, and again every time I try to reboot. It doesn't matter if I am trying to boot off the cd (win2k cd, or flashing cd) or off the hard drive, the machine just will not load an os. I can go into bios and change settings to my heart's content, so nothing is overclocked now. Any ideas? Thanks.

[allen337]

if you can get into the bios i would say its not a bad flash, try pulling memory sticks or changeing them, try removing hardware 1 thing at a time until you figure it out. ALLEN

[zachj]

If you can get into the BIOS, and there are no corrupted screens, and you're not getting POST codes, then I'd say there's nothing wrong with your BIOS.

Is the machine overclocked? If so, back off. If it POSTs, there's no need to ues the "fail-safe" jumper, but it might be overclocked too much. Also, check the voltage . . . If you can change settings, perhaps you did and didn't mean to?

I agree that swapping out different parts to check for damaged components is a good idea. Of course, the primary target here are the drives, as you can't boot to any of them, though if you know they're good, you might try a PCI ATA or RAID card with them to make sure it's not a bad IDE connector or anything. Are all the drives being detected in BIOS? If not, you know it's a bad connector or a bad drive. Make sure they're set to auto-detect.

If it was working, what changed? Just the BIOS? Is it a brand new release? Might have an error. Try flashing a previous BIOS if you think that might be what's causing the problem.

Z

[BBigJ]

No, nothing is overclocked and everything is at default. I emailed soltek and they said to rma the board, so I'm doing that. All the drives are correctly identified. I would flash back to the previous bios if I could even load dos, but I can't. Over at amdmb they seem to think that the nf2 boards are extremely prone to bad things happening during bios flashes, so that is probably what happened.

[zachj]

I hadn't heard that it happened specifically during the BIOS flash. I thought it was a general "NF2s are prone to corrupting the BIOS" thing . . .

Interesting. . .

Z

[BBigJ]

Ok, that might be it. I've been trying to find out more about this issue. Do you have any links?

[zachj]

No links, sorry. I'll look around, though. I'll probably only find "My BIOS is corrupt" complaints, but we'll see . . .

Z

EDIT** I found this:

"If memory serves, a lot of the Asus issues were a result of the battery supplying slightly under spec voltage combined with overclocking the board, replacing the battery fixed the bios corruption problem. "

and this (http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=345).

It appears that these issues have been fixxed in recent revisions, and that a lot of it (at least with the Abit/Asus [I forget!]) was to do with batteries not providing the proper current, which was fixxed with a new battery.