Added EFI Shell, now no BIOS/UEFI, no beeps, no video

waphles

Honorable
Nov 19, 2012
7
0
10,510
Windows 7 Home
ASRock Fatal1ty z97x Killer
Intel i7 4970k
Tri-X Sapphire R9 290
8 gb Corsair Dominator 2000C10 / 16gb G.Skill Ripjaws 1600C9D
Samsung 256gb SSD
Coolermaster 1200W Silent Pro Gold PSU

I'm at the 24 hour mark of working on this so I thought I'd ask for help. Here's the chain of events:

I received the Ripjaws yesterday, installed them, booted up with default settings (no XMP profile) and ran Prime95 blend for 2 hours. We were in a winter storm at the time and we lost power at the end of the two hours. I rebooted the computer, it seemed fine, and I ran Prime95 for another hour.

At that point, I stopped the test, rebooted to BIOS and loaded the 2000mhz profle, then ran Prime95 blend for another hour. During that I had did some reading about MemTest, so I stopped the Prime95, downloaded MemTest, created an image to a USB stick and rebooted to BIOS. While in the Fatal1ty BIOS setup, I selected the option to Launch EFI Shell from Filesystem Device (thinking it meant the USB), which "copies shelx64.efi to the root directory to launch EFI shell". This is where the problems began:

I saved the settings and rebooted, however this time the computer powered on with no video, stayed on for about 15 seconds, then restarted. This happened twice more until it came to screen saying that the computer had failed to boot three times. So, I went back to BIOS to check the settings and changed the setting for the number of failed boot checks, then changed the boot order to start with the USB then try my primary hard drive, thinking the computer wasn't finding the UEFI image for MemTest. This only made it worse.

Now I can't get a BIOS/UEFI screen, even if the computer fails to start 3, 5, 7 times. I tried resetting the BIOS with the CMOS jumper with no change, then tried to reset it by taking the motherboard battery out, still no change. At this point, I've tried booting with no RAM and one of each of the 4 RAM sticks I have, no change and no beeps, which I'm sure means something. I've switched PSU's, tried switching the ports on the SDD's/HDD's, even tried powering on with nothing connected to the motherboard, no RAM/GPU/HDD's, nothing. It never beeps, and it does turn on, but it only ever stays on for about 5-15 seconds, then restarts.

I'm at a loss. I can't figure out how to get the CMOS to reset so that I can get back to BIOS. I do have the Windows 7 Re-install disk in the CD tray but even with no HDD's installed it doesn't read it. I've gone through the checklists I can find on the site, no changes. I really think I messed something up with the BIOS but I don't have a clue how to check it.

I really appreciate any thoughts on this.
 
Solution
Your MB has a backup BIOS - have you tried that yet? Switch the bios jumper to the backup. If it boots up, then copy the backup to replace the main bios. Then switch the bios jumper back to the main.

pedrochin

Distinguished
Jan 11, 2014
31
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18,560
Your MB has a backup BIOS - have you tried that yet? Switch the bios jumper to the backup. If it boots up, then copy the backup to replace the main bios. Then switch the bios jumper back to the main.
 
Solution

waphles

Honorable
Nov 19, 2012
7
0
10,510
Well I'm annoyed I spent a day working on that and you fixed it in about 5 minutes, but thanks so much for pointing that out. Took two tries but I'm back up and running, I can't tell you how thankful I am.

For those that come across this later:
I went to switch the BIOS jumper to the 2nd setting and realized there was no jumper on the selector at all, which apparently is fine. I grabbed a spare jumper and put it on the 1st setting, which is probably what I was loading anyways because it had the same output, BUT there were at least beeps this time.

So, I moved the jumper to the 2nd setting and the BIOS/UEFI setup utility came up like it normally would. I first did the UEFI Backup (copying B -> A), then restarted and had it boot without going to BIOS. Windows came right up, everything looks like it shoudl.

Thanks again to pedrochin for the quick help.