Borked a board this morning

My new MSI Z97S SLI Plus. Been using it about 2 weeks. Flashed the bios to update from 1.2 to 1.7 and the messages said it completed successfully. Wouldn't post upon reboot, however. Tried resetting CMOS, took battery out, memory, swapped CPU and all the usual strategies but no dice. Just RMA'd it to MSI. Bummer. Can't imagine what went wrong. Settings were for a mild overclock and I probably should have put everything back to stock before flashing but I really don't think that was the issue. I've flashed lots of boards without a problem whose settings were not at default.

Shouldn't have mattered trents. anytime I flashed a bios it completely over write the whole thing

the overclock has nothing to do with it, I think when in the bios it runs at a default.
which method did you use to update the bios?
your board did not have dual bios? this has saved my nibbies more than once.

No mention of dual bios in specs but a good question. I flashed using the bios tool and a thumb drive. The curious part to me is that I got that success message.

Did you try reflashing before you sent it off?

I'm not sure what's with MSI and BIOS corruption but my last 3 MSI boards had only BIOS chip issues. On Z77 was corrupted BIOS and couple of times ME ( that's why there is guide how to fix it in my sig ). On X79 was dead BIOS chip. On X99 were dead 2 BIOS chips. X99 after replacement works fine in my brother's PC for last 2-3 months.

That's about the only.problem I've had with MSI boards too...there are people at this site grouping them with ECS for some reason. I understand on the AMD side, but not Intel...

EarthDog said:

Did you try reflashing before you sent it off?

Click to expand...

How could I? It wouldn't post. Blank screen. System locked.

About the only two ways that could happen is if the overclock was unstable (RAM/CPU/Cache) or the flash chip malfunctioned. The "success" message is just a software endpoint that you reach if it didn't notice anything go wrong - that doesn't mean something didn't go wrong, just that it didn't notice.

I thought that by about 2005 most boards had an emergency recovery process by which you could re-flash a board with a bad BIOS on it. Maybe I'm mistaken.

I had an MSI K7D back around, what, 2002 or so...same thing. In that case, though, I didn't realize they required that I flash each and every version BETWEEN the one I had, and the new one. I went straight up at least 3 version levels, and it borked it. It had a socketed ROM chip, and I ordered a ROM replacement...fixed the problem.

Stayed on the old BIOS after that.

That looks like a good board, but I think all boards should have some kind of emergency recovery option, be it dual BIOS chips or some other means.

yea, single bios,manual says>>>>>>1x 64 Mb flash UEFI AMI BIOS