Pc wont boot , wont beep after BIOS update [Archive]

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veras126

07-27-2008, 08:40 PM

First of all...specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz
Asus P5n32-e sli plus mobo
2 gigs of ram (two 1 gig on dual channel)
PNY Verto 9600 gt 512 mb vid card
500w power supply

So when i bought my new pc, at bios post it said that it needed an update to "unleash its fury" since my mobo only read my core 2 duo processor as one...

I Ignored that for a while since everything ran great, but i just kinda got "lazy" since everytime at startup i had to click F1 at post because of the "unleash the fury" message and i didnt wanted to do that anymore plus the fact that things would actually improve if i updated my BIOS...

Now I never updated a Bios before, but i followed the Asus manual on how to update their Asus mobo and got the update files from the ASUS website (yes, they were the correct mobo model) and did everything the ASUS way so to speak...

I updated the BIOS within Windows ( a terrible mistake now that I did further research about updating BIOS) and everything went fine, installed new BIOS and prompt me to reboot... once i rebooted.... everything went downhill

My pc turns on...Fans work, fan on vidcard work, mobo is green lit, pc is green lit... but... no POST beep no Display , pc monitor turns up and goes to sleep mode in a second...

I reset the CMOS to see if that would work, nada.
Unplugged everything, checked everything, replug, turn pc with only cpu and 1 ram card, nada.

So now, i'm really pissed off, with a non-working gaming pc and very very frustrated...

I need help...will give cookie...

admflameberg

07-27-2008, 10:16 PM

Sounds like the bios got corrupted or you flashed it with the wrong rev of the motherboard.Because some motherboards have a newer or a older rev which has a diffent bios.

You gonna have to Rma the motherboard,There is another way but it might be hard for you to do. So you bettter off RMAing it.

bryguy001

07-27-2008, 10:59 PM

Check your mobo's manual. Sometimes there is a jumper you can set to revert it to factory. Also if it also has onboard video, try plugging the monitor into that and see if any messages come up.

dark_shroud

07-27-2008, 11:22 PM

Check your mobo's manual. Sometimes there is a jumper you can set to revert it to factory. Also if it also has onboard video, try plugging the monitor into that and see if any messages come up.

I'd recommend this as well, but you might have to remove your video card for it to work properly. At least that's how it is with my Gateway.

burkhartmj

07-27-2008, 11:36 PM

Another idea is never buy ASUS again :p

Mildly fecetious, I've just had many bad experiences with my ASUS mobo.

Are you saying the computer doesn't even beep with POST or is it just not displaying video? I had the issue where it reverted back to the onboard video with my old dell, but it still POSTed and started up the OS, with all the sounds that go with it. No sounds means something else is horribly wrong rather than onboard video issues.

tehboris

07-28-2008, 12:08 AM

The best way to flash BIOS is using DOS. Boot DOS off a Win98 CD and do it from there.

veras126

07-28-2008, 12:33 AM

Already tried that the jumper thing...and nada..

Theres also a feature that my mobo has which is the crashfree thingy....

When you screw up things you just boot up with the mobo driver cd and it will reset everything including BIOS...but it just doesnt works...

Tried the vid card thing... pc gave me a long beep followed by 2 short ones.. which meant that it was a video adapter problem... tried my vid card on another pc and it worked fine...so im running out of ideas here..

I think this is just screwed up... I read more about this kind of problem and it seems that im not alone in this.On the ASUS forums there are plenty of threads that has the exact same problem and all of them go nowhere near a solution...

@burkhartmj ...both no dispalying video, no beeps nothing...

Ill probably just buy another mobo...just a lil pissed off that this thing was no more than 4 months old.

I feel bad tho that i didn't updated the BIOS the DOS way...gotta learn somehow i guess..

burkhartmj

07-28-2008, 12:44 AM

Definitely RMA it. I got the same error beep on mine, and ran into the same brick wall. The RMA board works fine though, have had it for a pretty long while too. my main problem with ASUS is their obsessive urge to put things in OS apps that should be in BIOS, like overclocking and BIOS flashing and such. Ends up sucking up memory for things that every other goddamned manufacturer puts in the BIOS. That's a huge reason I don't even bother trying to overclock, is so I dont have to install their shitty apps.

pcman667

07-28-2008, 01:32 AM

use the utility that comes with asus motherboards that allows you to reflash your bios to the factory one.

davmoo

07-28-2008, 02:28 AM

Unless I've misunderstood something, you're going to have to get the motherboard to at least pass POST and beep before you can run any utility to restore the bios. So if it won't even do that, your only option is probably RMA.

But before you do that, and assuming the motherboard does have its own on-board video, pull the video card and hard drives and everything else that's external to the motherboard except the power supply and keyboard, plug a monitor in to the on-board video, pray to every god or deity you can think of, and fire it up and see what happens. Edit: Oops...you're going to have to leave some memory plugged in too.

For what its worth, I feel your pain. There is no operation I hate more than updating a bios, simply because it can so easily hose your board...as you've found out. I just recently had to flash bios on another motherboard to support a Wolfdale processor...and I don't think I drew a breath during the entire process. And what really hacked me off about having to do that is the motherboard packaging had "Supports the latest Wolfdale cores!!!" stamped all over it...then I find out after setting it up that if I really wanted to run my new processor at 3Ghz instead of 1.6Ghz, a flashin' the bios we will do.

Finally, and I realize this is a lot like recommending a new gate after your dog has run away, never NEVER *NEVER* flash a bios from within Windows. And if your flashing software allows it, *ALWAYS* make a backup of the old bios before you erase it.

tehboris

07-28-2008, 02:41 AM

Finally, and I realize this is a lot like recommending a new gate after your dog has run away, never NEVER *NEVER* flash a bios from within Windows. And if your flashing software allows it, *ALWAYS* make a backup of the old bios before you erase it.

How does backing up the old BIOS help if the flashing turns the motherboard in to a bread board?

davmoo

07-28-2008, 04:22 AM

How does backing up the old BIOS help if the flashing turns the motherboard in to a bread board?

In an incident that extreme, it doesn't. But in a situation where you find out the new bios is bootable but causes other problems, it sure is handy to have that old bios to go back to if needed.

Besides, I work on a simple logic...if I make the backup I'll never need it, but if I fail to make the backup I'll be needing it within an hour.

trusighter

07-28-2008, 08:58 AM

The motherboard is dead. I had this problem twice within 2 weeks with 2 different computers. The first computer was a desktop that I built myself, it has an ASUS P5B-E motherboard. I was updating the bios because some raid settings weren't working correctly when I had a raid-0 between two SATA drives and a seperate IDE drive. The IDE drive wasn't being recognized when the SATA drives were connected. I installed the bios update on Vista (worse thing to possibly do!!!!!), but during the installation the bios update seemed like it crashed to Vista because it wasn't doing anything software side, so vista automatically closed the update after it flashed my bios. It wouldn't recognize the bios anymore...luckily this motherboard had a bios recovery mode and I was able to restore the bios using a CD, I have not seen any other motherboard have this feature. It was a life saver!!

The second incident was on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 laptop through their ThinkVantage System Update. The bios update was labeled as 'critical' so I proceeded to install it assuming that it was a needed update for the PC, but the same thing happened on this laptop since it was also running Vista, and vista closed the bios update program, and the bios was erased with no new bios written in... I called Lenovo support (at 2am!) and they were really helpful in telling me exactly what I assumed...The motherboard was completely dead. I wasn't as fortunate on this laptop as on the desktop because there was no bios recovery mode I could enter. I had to send the laptop in to get the whole motherboard replaced.

Backups won't work in this situation because once the bios is erased, there is nothing to tell the components how to boot up to run, so any backups you might have made would be useless.

I have had a lot of success updating the bios under Windows XP as it doesn't automatically close the program when it isn't responding (the program is actually flashing the rom on the motherboard with the new bios, but windows cannot see this happening and it assumes that the program stalled and closes it right as it starts writing the new bios).

If you REALLY want to update the bios on a computer, check to see if they have a bootable CD version of the bios update because that is the easiest method to update the bios. If they don't, find a way to boot into MS-DOS (windows 98 cd, or floppy disk would work) and then use DOS, otherwise if you can't do either one, don't update the bios if you aren't running Windows 2000 or XP!!

just my $.02

admflameberg

07-28-2008, 10:04 AM

Some motherboards let you update it thru the bios using a usb flashdrive Which I have done. yea doing it in the os is always asking for trouble when something goes wrong.

computoman

07-28-2008, 02:56 PM

I flashed a bios once and thought it was dead. I left the motherboard battery out of the machine for a day or two. I then reinserted the battery and cranked up the machine, It has been running since, Hope you are that lucky. Some motherboards come with a backup bios and all you have to activate it is to change a jumper. If I ever get a new fancy motherboard, I will make sure it has that feature. Only your manual knows for sure.

kurtz62

08-06-2008, 11:00 AM

I had the same issue as the original poster. I used ASUS update from within Vista32 to flash ASUS p5n32-E SLI to bios 1404. On reboot the pc would not even post beep, and i thought it was a throw away.

I disconnected power and removed covers and disconnected harddrive and DVD drive. Removed CMOS battery. I then pressed and held the power up button with the intention of discharging anything that was left. Put the battery back in and away she went. Reconnected drives and restarted. I checked the bios and the flash had completed OK

lnxpenguin4ever

08-07-2008, 01:23 AM

Try unplugging your video card, pop in the CD, and start up the system. From a lot of the posts I read, CrashFree doesn't activate until it detects the video card pulled from the system. You can also try a PCI video card if you have one.

If that doesn't work, try this:

Follow this article up to step 11:
http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/20080703649/how-to-flash-your-bios-without-a-floppy-drive.html

Download AWDFlash.exe (Award Flash Utility) from Asus, or grab it off your Asus CD. Put it on your USB drive.

Download your firmware, and unzip it to your USB drive as well.

Keep the video card unplugged (or the PCI video card installed), plug in the flash drive, power up the system, and it should boot from the USB drive with the reduced CrashFree bios. From there, you should be able to use DOS to get your BIOS reflashed.

Good luck! I have no idea if this works...but from the hour and a half of research I just did...it can't hurt to try. :-)

veras126

08-08-2008, 10:06 PM