Motherboard brainless but not dead

Discusses BIOS flashers and utilities from Award, AMI and Uniflash
Post Reply
ccjdtb13
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 29, 2006 2:13 pm

Hi I'm Colin and I'll keep it brief. Never done this before so I apologise if I'm going about this wrongly. I have a P4 motherboard made by MSI for Acer. Its model number is MS-6533 ver. 2.0. On a bench with only RAM, CPU and heatsink, PSU, mouse and keyboard this will not post to screen. By the addition of an AGP graphics card instead of the onboard video it will post but not normally. The only thing I get is that there is no Bios ROM, under that it says keyboard error. a few similar short lines about commands and then a floppy drive enabled prompt. By adding a floppy drive I can run a boot disk and it boots to a dos screen but sometimes it acts as if it has Caps lock on and will not type numbers but after a reboot it seems normal and I have tried to flash it with a bios but it seems to be rejecting the files even after adding some extra parameters it is still refusing. I am of the opinion from reading the various prompts that this motherboard is completely devoid of a Bios setup of any kind due to corruption or an incorrect flash. Any ideas at all are welcome. Thanks, Colin.
ajzchips
El cheapo dude
Posts: 3048
Joined: Sat Mar 23, 2002 12:41 pm
Location: Madrid, Spain

Have you tried a different flasher, like Uniflash?
ccjdtb13
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 29, 2006 2:13 pm

Hi again,
I have tried nothing other than what is stated as I had hoped against hope that what I wrote would be enough to arouse the thoughts of someone that had encountered this same problem before. My gut instinct says that someone has flashed this Bios with the wrong files or there is a virus in the bios. I was hoping that someone would have a bios virus cure (just a remote chance) and was interested in the parameter of /nbl which I have heard suggests "no boot lock" but I am no expert in this field. As time means less to me than money I thought a bit of time spent asking was preferable to making it into a fishing sinker or a paper weight. If however it is not recoverable i will be forced to trash it but that seems a pity at this early stage as this is not an old motherboard in the big scheme of things. It is P4 socket 478 granted its not really up to date but it is still thought of as a formidable system to an everyday computer user. Any help is gratefully considered.
Denniss
BIOS Guru
Posts: 3153
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 8:16 pm
Location: Near Hannover (CEBIT) Germany
Contact:

Please post the exact error messages you get.
You should really try Uniflash - it should also be able to be used via command line and several parameters set, usable via Floppy and autoexec.bat.

It looks like either the keyboard controller is shot or the fuse located somewhere near the keyboard connector. Did you try a USB keyboard ?
ccjdtb13
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 29, 2006 2:13 pm

Hi again, I am most grateful to all that tried to help me with this problem and I now have it working like new. It was as I suspected completely devoid of a Bios file. To help anyone diagnosing in the future the exact commands were:-

Award boot block BIOS v1.0
copyright (C) 2000, Award Software, Inc.

Bios Rom Checksum error
Keyboard error or no Keyboard present

Detecting Floppy drive, A media...
Drive A error. System Halt

By adding a FDD I was able to boot the motherboard and put in a Bios file which we kept getting a message saying the Bios file was a mismatch and boot block Bios was rejecting files.
I had previously seen in this program on other Bios problems that an added command /nbl might overcome bootblock and so in desperation I tried it and it worked. the bios loaded and the system rebooted and returned to a normal post screen at which time I was able to press delete and go straight into Cmos settings and begin adjusting the system.
My problem is solved and I thank all those that attempted to assist and the fact that you wanted to help gave me the determination to persist and in succeeding it actually made sweet justice to my efforts, but the answer to it all did come from this website.
Denniss
BIOS Guru
Posts: 3153
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 8:16 pm
Location: Near Hannover (CEBIT) Germany
Contact:

Hmmm - non-working integrated VGA and BootBlock error showing looks like CPU or memory damage or your board badly damaged. The integrated VGA usually reacts very picky at damaged RAM as does the Bios if some special memory lines are affected.

Try to test with a diferent memory stick (or ose only one if you have two or more).
Post Reply