#$&@ did i kill my motherboard??

[Squirrel5978]

I have a gigabyte 965p-ds3 rev. 3.3. I was changing settings in the bios and saved. I waited for a lot longer than normal for the system to restart like it normally would. I waited at least 10 minutes, and then figured I should just shut it off. When I turned it back on, I get a message "Scanning BIOS Image in hard drive..." which just stays up indefinitely. I've tried pulling the power for a while which worked to reset the bios, and I pulled the battery on the board for a while. I left the screen up for about 90 minutes and nothing happened. I've tried putting a copy of the bios on a flash drive, a cd, and onto a floppy but nothings worked. Supposedly the motherboard has some bios express rescue which I guess is this thing searching the hard drive for some copy of the bios, but it doesn't seem to be working. Anyone have any ideas how to fix this? I really don't want to go spend another $150 on a replacement board.

 

[flabbergasted]

You write you were doing some tweaking in the bios before everything went down hill? What adjustments were you making? Can you even boot into your bios? If you can get back into the bios, I'd set everything back to default and see if works.

 

[Squirrel5978]

My memory is rated for 2.2V. I was having problems at 2.2V and was running fine at 2.1V for about a month. I was testing it at 2.2V and lowered it to 2.1V when it happened. I can't boot inot the bios. As soon as I hit the pwoer something about Award bios bootblock 1.0 C 2000 Scanning BIOS image in hard drive... and nothing seems to be happening.

 

[flabbergasted]

I googled your problem and came up with this. Motherboard Bios Problems Go through some of the posts. I'm sure you'll find your solution.

 

[Squirrel5978]

I've been searching the problem. Most everything I find talks about using a floppy to reflash the bios. But I tried plugging in a drive with a bootdisk, but it never even checks the floppy. It just goes right to "scanning bios image in hard drive..." and never gets past that. I found out that gigabyte is stupid and didn't include the floppy and want you to recover the bios from a "hidden protected area", or HPA, at the end of the hard drive. I got the crazy idea that it is trying to read my hard drive, but it can't read my sata drive with the limited code on the bootblock. I;m going to pull out an old computer with an old ide drive and use linux to create an hpa with my bios on it and plugging it in and see if that works...somehow I don't think it will...