Bad Bios Up Date - No Post - Replacement Bios Chip - No Post (in a slightly different way)

808zerowaitstate

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Dec 25, 2015
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4,510
The following occurred late one night as a result of a poor decision (or two) ...

I attempted to use the Asus windows based utility to update the bios on a H170m Plus motherboard. I downloaded what I thought was the correct .cap file from the Asus site.

The utility accepted the .cap file and rebooted into the bios and it a appeared to be programming the new bios onto the chip. Progress complete. Reboot, but now it wants to read the .cap file again, however when i eventually find it using the bios's file manager, it wont accept it... I remember some how restarting the process and getting the same message over and over. I look in the manual, put in the Asus recovery disk find the bios on it and try that, it initially appears to program it in, then a reboot and same thing happens - it wants to see the file again and again restarts with the same result, over and over again asking to see a file it wont accept. This is where, out of frustration, I made my fatal mistake when I decided to restart the computer by resetting it.

Now the machine will do nothing but spin up the fans and the dvd drive, there is no display, no beep codes and no response from the keyboard and no light under the mouse. However the machine remained powered up, fans running.

I subsequently received a replacement BIOS chip, put it in, but didn't work either, the symptoms this time the fans spin up briefly as does the dvd drive then it abruptly stops and restarts, over and over again.

I have tried everything: clearing CMOS, removing the battery, stripping out every non essential component (including, graphics card, hard disks, one and both of the memory chips).

So what do you folks think? Have I wrecked the motherboard (probably) the processor or the memory or all three? Or could it be something else?


 

808zerowaitstate

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Dec 25, 2015
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4,510
@alexoui. Thanks for responding. I specified the motherboard to the supplier of the replacement BIOS chip and asked them to flash the most recent stable bios so I can only assume they did as I asked. As for the notch on the chip, I took a photo of the chip before I replaced it and the notch was in the opposite direction to the one shown on your linked image, ie towards the edge of the motherboard. Also the socket has a corresponding notch in that direction - altho I can't see the other side. The chip had Winbond 250128FV1Q 1517 on it and the replacement chip had Winbond 250128FV1Q 1342 on it. Would it do any harm to change which way round I insert the chip?