Intel mobo won't boot -- One beep, no display.

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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jonerez
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Joined: Sat Dec 09, 2006 4:27 pm

Hi,

I reinstalled Windows on a friend's computer. He's running a Celleron, on a D845GVSR Intel board. After the installation, I needed to update some of his drivers (for the on board VGA, for his sound card, etc). While at it, I foolishly decided to also update his BIOS, using Intel's express updater.

The updater said it will flash the BIOS, and that I shouldn't turn off the power for about 3 minutes. It then restarted Windows.

The computer then got stuck on the "shutting down" screen. I thought maybe the BIOS is being flashed, so I waited about 4 minutes before pressing Reset. That was the last I so of a running system.

After the computer was reset, it wouldn't boot. It turned on (all fans runnning, HD powered up), gave one beep, no video, and started to access the floppy and CD one at a time.

At this point I thought I PLEASE BAN ME FOR SWEARING up the BIOS flashing and left it in a not working state. I started to look for BIOS recovery. Some helpful info was found in Intel's website. So I took a floppy diskette, and put the relevant .BIO files on it, opened the computer, took out the BIOS config jumper, put the diskette in, and powered the system on.

It read from the diskette for about 20 seconds, but then stopped. I thought the operation is done -- so I put the jumper back in, the diskette out, and powered the system on. It was the same as before.

I then thought that maybe the original flashing went alright, but the board is somehow incompatible with the new version. So I downloaded an old version of the same BIOS that I could find on the internet, and did the recovery process with it. Afterwards I turned the system on -- still the same.

Then I saw in some forums that if I take out the RAM and hear lots of beeps, it means that the BIOS is ok. I did it, and indeed I heard lots of beeps. So the BIOS is ok.

It now leaves me in an unknowing place. From Intel's site about beep codes:
You are getting 1, 2, or 3 beeps that indicate a memory failure.

1 beep - Refresh Error (with nothing on the screen and it is not a video problem)
But I don't really get what it means. I only now noticed that 1 beep indicates a memory failure. I will try to replace the RAM, so it seems unlikely that the RAM suddenly went bad after I flashed the BIOS.

Do you have any other ideas if that doesn't work?

Thanks
zanor
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Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:58 am

After it has finished reading from the floppy you have to give it some time to flash the bios, because it does not start flashing the bios before it has read the whole bios file from the floppy...
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