Failed MSI bios? or bad new nvidia driver?

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14 Sep 2011
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282
(now resolved - see last past)

Hi guys. I have an MSI Z68-GD65 G3 board gtx580 gfx card, i5-2500k processor, ddr3 ram, decent corsair psu 850 watt, decent cpu corsair cooler etc - all worked fined for the past 12 months no issues at all. - everything worked first time with the MSI board. I've had perfectly stable gameplay on bf3 and temperatures are low etc.. I would point out that I have not overclocked at all because I was too scared, despite having a very overclockable i5-2500k processor.

On 21.11.2012, I updated from the last official tested released nvidia driver which was stable, to the beta driver.... I don't think I actually restarted my pc in the last 3 days ...unti today when it won't boot again.

Today, I noticed that my cpu water cooler was going into the louder phases that it usually only ever does when it has a reason to because it's launching a game or using the processor for something, but there was, at that time no discerable reason, so I checked task manager and saw that cores 3 and 4 were going to 100% which was baffling me - as there were no programs running in memory that would force it to do so.

I went into the software program for msi control center to see if I could check the temperatures of the cpu at first, I remember clicking eco clock for a second, and htem immediately pressing default on the overclocking tab. I suspect this have might have been a mistake.... or not? I assumed this was not overclocking so was just ensuring it was off. I just closed the window without clicking any other apply buttons etc.

I was a bit confused and so I decided to restart my pc to see if it was a temporary glitch. When the pc restarted it said something along the lines of "the memory had changed" and prompted me to change settings or something... this is probably to do with the above clicks I made in control centre??? I just ignored it and tried to start up as normal as I didn't think I'd changed anything on my system.

Unfortunately, the position that I am in now is that it won't boot into windows as usual, and when it gets to the load screen with the windows logo it gives me a BSOD. The black screen hangs at B2 in the bottom right corner. I also note that the dual bios LED is flashing blue intermittently in 1 second intervals - which I understand to be a failed primary bios??? is this correct? I'm not sure if this is new or not, but I think it might be.

I've tried restoring windows to the point in time before it installed the nvidia display driver (which did exist) - however this was without success and windows continues to bsod. - the windows diagnostic that runs (windows 7 64bit home edition) states it thinks that it's a driver possibly but the automatic restore failed to work.

My gut feelijng is that it's either to do with the ram being out of synch in the bios because of that misclick in the control centre I mentioned earlier - if it's to do with that then I have a problem because I cannot seem to access the interface / any kind of bios on my system using the delete key or f11. I can only seem to get to the windows failure option of restore mode or normal startup.

The other problem is that I suspect it might be is that it's just coincidence and that BIOS has suddenly failed (hence blinking blue light)

lastly, it might be becauuse the nvidia beta driver I installed a few days ago is rubbish.

nothing else has changed much in the few days - unless it's a virus I don't know about or something.....

What to do?

My questions are therefore:

what should i do to test what the problem is?
what do you think the likely diagnosis is?
How do i fix it if so.....

thanks guys in advance - look forward to hearing from you.
 
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14 Sep 2011
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282
Ok i managed to get in to the bios again - point and click.

For some unknown reason the hard drive launch setting had reverted to IDE instead of AHCI - i was using AHCI and ofcourse IDE would never work with my windows installation for this reason.

I have NO idea why it would do this as I haven't done anything to make this change..... I'm back into windows now and it all seems to be working but I haven't done a restart yet or anything.

The mobo blue led blinker is still blinking intermittently.... does that mean failed bios could be the reason and it's reverted to the secondary bios which wasn't set to AHCI?? (that's my best theory). If so, do I need to do anything to protect my motherboard more / flash the failed bios or something? I don't know much about dual bios other than it's a safety thing.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
14 Sep 2011
Posts
282
Working now!

Ok i did a bit of googling and it turns out the primary bios must have failed. I went into the click bios / security / enable auto update of the bios so when the pc restarted the 2nd bios flashed the 1st one and it's all hunky dory now... no longer flashing blue, what a good system :)
 
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