Gigabyte F2A55M-HD2 Posts but no video (full story inside)

goatee87

Honorable
Dec 24, 2013
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10,510
This whole thing is really bizaare so I'll try to retrace all my steps.

I built a computer with the above mobo and stuck in an old Hard drive that had windows installed already. Everything booted up fine and I was using it for several weeks. I also vaguely recall successfully accessing the bios screen but I am not sure.

Over black friday, I bought an SSD. I plugged everything in with the intent to do a clean install on the SSD. I created a windows boot disk on a portable hard drive. I left the old hard drive in the box as I intend to keep it.

I rebooted my computer and attempted to access the bios so I could set it to boot the usb drive. It would display the splash screen which gives three options, del to access bios, f9 for system information, f12 for boot screen. When I hit one of these keys, the screen would go black or blank (I think black). The BIOS never loaded. I restarted a few times and each time, it would boot up normally to windows (on the old drive) but if I tried to access the bios, it would give me this black screen.

So then I decided it might be a cmos problem and attempted to clear cmos. One mistake I made here was I forgot to unplug the system. I just shut it off and shorted the cmos pins as per the mannual (not sure if this left any lasting damage). Clearing CMOS did nothing. Tried the battery method as well. This too did not work.

Then I unplugged everything new and just plugged in the old drive to see if it would boot up to windows at least. This time, I didn't get the splash screen either, went straight to blank/black.

So then I removed everything except the mobo, ram, and CPU. Still nothing.

I plugged in the system speaker. It beeps once (which I think indicates a successful post) but no video, no spash screen, nothing.

Now what?