Page 1 of 1

Computer not starting after BIOS flashed

Posted: Fri May 31, 2019 3:28 pm
by Stuart Aitchison
I have an Intel socket 775 machine with an MSI motherboard. I flashed the BIOS as prescribed, from a bootable USB flash disk, aand the flash process completed normally.

The machine started up quite nicely with the checksum error message, so I took F1 and went into the BIOS.

The BIOS could see the drives and the flash drive, so that was OK.

I then took F6 to set the optimised defaults, and reset the boot sequence, and the machine now refuses to do anything in spite of anything I say to it, be it polite or otherwise.

When I start it, the CD drive light flashes, the hard drive light flashes, and then both go off and the machine simply stops at that point. There is nothing on the screen, which shows no sign of life.

The motherboard is an MSI MS 7529.
The BIOS is version was 2.6, now updated to 2.8.

If there is any way that I can convince this machine to work I would be glad to hear it.

Stuart Aitchison

.

Re: Computer not starting after BIOS flashed

Posted: Sat Jun 01, 2019 12:15 am
by edwin
Hi,

First of all, try a fresh new CR2032 3V lithium coin cell battery. If that is empty, your machine will appear to be dead.

If that doesn't do the trick, we'll have to go to barebones setup meaning disconnecting drives etc to see if we can make the bare minimum combination (CPU,motherboard, one memory stick, video card, keyboard) booting to a "no bootable media found" message or something similar.

Re: Computer not starting after BIOS flashed

Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2019 1:50 pm
by Stuart Aitchison
Hi:

Thanks for the ideas.

This is a slightly longer post.

I removed the battery and installed another one. The machine booted up, and came up with the MSI splash screen, and then showed the boot info, and informed me that the BIOS settings were wrong, and that the date and time were not set. It gave me F1 to go into the BIOS, or F2 to take the defaults and continue.

I took F1, went into the BIOS, and reset the date and time. I also checked that the BIOS was seeing the HDDs and the CD rom drive, which it was. I took F10 to save and reboot, and once again the CD rom drive light flashed, and I got the cold, black fish-eye, and that was that. The keyboard had the Num lock and Scroll lock lights on, but I got nothing further.

I removed the battery, gave it about 20 seconds (it gives the caps time to discharge), replaced the battery and rebooted. Once again I got the MSI splash screen, the boot info, the story about BIOS settings, and a choice of F1 or F2.

This time I took F2. The screen flickered, and the cursor moved to the top left hand corner of the screen, and the machine proceeded to load Windows (Win 7). I logged on, and got into the machine. I then reset the sytem date and time. I also then proceeded to do some bits and pieces in Windows, including using Ms Word, and the machine seemed to work.

I decided to restart the machine, and it again refused to load the BIOS. The CD rom drive flashed a few times, the Num lock and Scroll lock lights came on, and there it sat. Really sulky I call it.

It seems that when I remove the battery and reboot, and take the default settings, the BIOS works.

I have two RAM slots for DDR2 RAM, and I have two banks of 2Gb RAM. I tried removing the RAM for each slot in turn, and then using the first slot only with each RAM bank in turn, and then the second slot only, also with each RAM bank in turn, and the BIOS still did nothing.

It seems that as soon as the BIOS is forced to reset, and the defaults are taken, it will continue. However, the moment I have either shut down, or restart, and the BIOS is not reset, the BIOS gets the sulks and refuses to do anything.

I obviously can't keep on removing the battery and resetting the BIOS the whole time.

Are there any further thoughts or ideas on this?

Regards,

Stuart Aitchison

Re: Computer not starting after BIOS flashed

Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2019 5:38 pm
by edwin
Ok, if you can make it into windows, flash the bios again with the utility from MSI, but this time run it as Administrator. Because I have a feeling that is what went wrong the first time...

Re: Computer not starting after BIOS flashed

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2019 3:25 am
by Stuart Aitchison
Thanks.

When I flashed the BIOS I had already loaded a version of DOS (I think it was FreeDOS - I used Rufus to set the drive up) onto a USB stick, and I also loaded the BIOS flash program and details file onto the the flash drive, and I booted directly onto this flash drive, and ran the BIOS flash program from this. I did not go through Windows.

I will try it again through Windows command prompt, but as administrator.

Stuart Aitchison