BIOS won't load. What can I do?

[c47man]

I have an i7-3930K on a Gigabyte X79-UP4, and I'd like to overclock. When the computer boots, I press the F2 or DEL key to enter BIOS, but after pressing the key, it will show the blue background of the UEFI BIOS with a title at the top ("Gigabyte UEFI - DualBIOS"), but none of the menus or settings will appear. I have to press the power button to shut down the computer and restart. I've tried accessing BIOS from a reboot, a full shutdown, and even a cleared CMOS (took the battery out of mobo for 30s and disconnected PSU). Any ideas as to what on earth is going on here? I am running the BIOS F2 version, and the only version above that is a Beta.

 

[flank2]

I don't think the bios has been cleared. You need to take out the battery, unplug the psu and press the power button a few times. If it still doesn't work maybe try the beta bios.

 

[smorizio]

could be two issues. one the keyboard is wireless and not turning on till the bios posts. try a wired keyboard. if it is a wired one make sure it plugged into a usb 2.0 port. the other issue could be that the mb new efi bios is booting faster then it seeing your keystroke. try downloading the windows bios control program and change in the boot setting the delay to wait (most efi bios have it set for one sec. change it to 10-20 sec and see if you can get into the bios.

 

[c47man]

I don't think the bios has been cleared. You need to take out the battery, unplug the psu and press the power button a few times. If it still doesn't work maybe try the beta bios.

That was the very first thing I did, but it hasn't worked. How do I update BIOS on an x64 system? When I ran the updater from Gigabyte it said it couldn't run because it was incompatible with 64-bit systems.

 

[c47man]

could be two issues. one the keyboard is wireless and not turning on till the bios posts. try a wired keyboard. if it is a wired one make sure it plugged into a usb 2.0 port. the other issue could be that the mb new efi bios is booting faster then it seeing your keystroke. try downloading the windows bios control program and change in the boot setting the delay to wait (most efi bios have it set for one sec. change it to 10-20 sec and see if you can get into the bios.

Well the keyboard works fine. The boot screen appears, I press the button, and it enter the BIOS after I press the button. The problem is that the BIOS doesn't load completely. It is just the blank blue background without any of the menu items, settings, or the mouse pointer. The only way to get out of this is to hard-kill the computer.

 

[flank2]

hmm gigabyte doesn't seem to provide a way to flash that mobo's bios via DOS... strange. If you have a spare hdd laying around maybe install a x86 OS to it just to flash the bios or maybe contact gigabyte and ask them.