P4P800 Dead, I think with corrupt BIOS

Hello everyone. I have been building computers for seven years and using ASUS products throughout with never a problem. Anyway, I have a 2.6C P4 with 512K DDR, a WD 120G on an IDE slot and a CDR drive on the other slot with no overclock. I flashed to the final 1009 BIOS version yesterday morning and everything seemed fine. Later on that night I turned the computer on and was checking some settings in the BIOS and noticed my Hard drive and CD-ROM were on the slave settings, even though they were both plugged in as masters and nothing should have been a slave. So I thought that was pretty weird, but should be fixed by a quick reboot. So I rebooted and then all the fans came on, but just a blank screen on the monitor with no HD activity. I figured it was just locked and a couple of reboots would cause the BIOS to reset. Well I tried rebooting continuously with no luck and powering off and on. I finally tried clearing the CMOS as stated in the manual with no luck. Next I tried swapping video cards, RAM sticks and even the CPU and nothing worked, just the same power comes on and all fans spin, but no video or HD activity. I think either the BIOS was corrupted somehow or maybe the whole board is dead. I purchased this board 1 month and a half ago from Googlegear, so I am outside their 30 day return window. I have just emailed ASUS about the problem, but god knows when they may reply. Has anyone ever dealt with ASUS for RMA issues? Or does anyone know if someplace like CompUSA or Best Buy may have a BIOS flasher so I can pull the BIOS chip and reflash it separately? I live in the Jacksonville, FL area if anyone knows of a local store that may be able to help. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Scott

Have you tried booting it with no drives attached?

Not yet, will that sometimes reset the BIOS.

boot the machine. put the asus cd rom in the drive and shut the machine down. unplug the machine for 45 seconds or so. plug the machine back in and try booting.

Already tried, but good idea because I know the BIOS will recover sometimes with the ASUS CD in there. The CD drive light comes on for about 8 seconds and then nothing. I tried this about 4 times.

By the way, how do you like the ABIT IC7 board. Is it as stable as the ASUS and I guess you get PAT at all times since its an 875 board. I may switch to that board if I cant get this thing to work. Thanks.

Scott

Its not bad. It scores roughly the same as the p4p800 did in synthetic benchmarks. The bios was confusing at first since I boot from a serial drive but I got it all worked out.

The amount I could overclock didnt go up or down. It was about the same. Originally I wanted to mode the Northbridge with a passive Zalman but it wont fit I dont think with the Zalman CPU Heatsink. The thing is massive. So I pulled off the stock chipset cooler and removed the nasty gum and replaced it with arctic ceramique. It really didnt do much for my oc.

Newegg has had some IC7-G refurbished lately for 130. not a bad deal imho.

hey i had a similar problem with my P4P800..
try taking out the cmos battery and pulling the power plug... leave it off for a while and put the battery and power plug back in.. workd for me.