Copyright

All blog posts, unless otherwise noted, are copyrighted to the Author (that's me) and may not be used without written permission.

October 31, 2008

Dead Motherboard

My machine has been acting a little funny the last few days and not like the smooth gaming rig it has been since I built it. Last night I set my machine to go to Sleep mode and, when I decided to check email just prior to going to bed, it wouldn't come on. I managed to get it to run the BIOS, but then it died on POST.

Something was wrong with the BIOS.

This morning I read up on how to re-flash my BIOS for this motherboard, downloaded a known good as well as the current BIOS, put them on a USB, and managed to boot the system into the BIOS. I followed the directions, but the flash utility would not downgrade the BIOS to the known good. Since I was slightly afraid the current BIOS might be causing the problem, I wasn't really wanting to try that one, but I did anyway. Sure enough, it failed the flash and now my machine is dead to the world.

Didn't really want to buy a new MB right now, but if I want to get up and running, I must. Without a BIOS, a machine goes nowhere really, really fast.

I'm hopeful that I can go to the place that Andrew showed me the other day and get a replacement today, as I'd like to get up and running. I'm going to double-check my older MB parts to see if any of them can run my current rig, but I'm pretty sure they cannot.

Didn't really need this right now.

Addendum 10/31/08
Called a place that my BIL Andrew recommended. They had virtually the same motherboard in stock, but an upgraded model (a couple of bells and whistles I didn't have on mine). Were willing to sell it to me for $80 CDN. Same board online is selling for between $120 and $140 CDN. Got them to agree to give my money back if the board didn't work, then went home and installed it. I'm up and running and everything seems okay. Will knock wood, but unless this is a bad board, I should be good to go now.

No comments:

Post a Comment