Hardware Death. RMA Mainboard?

MaareK · 24 Feb 2007 at 19:42

Hey folks, I’m in dire straights here and I’m hoping you can help me out a little.. or at least confirm my suspicions.

We have an A8R32-MVP Deluxe which seems to have died a death tonight. Installed Windows Vista on Friday and everything has been working fine and reliably since then.

However tonight while playing World of Warcraft it just suddenly decided to die. Giving a BIOS checksum error and then gave me the option to restore the BIOS from a floppy/CD/USB Device.

So I download the BIOS from ASUS and pop it onto a CD, pop it in the drive and boot up… the BIOS recovery tool seems to delete the existing bios and the program a new one followed by a prompt to restart the machine to recover.

‘Cool’ I think.. ‘this wasn’t so bad’ .. how wrong was I? .. after shutting down and then powering the machine back up again.. I’m confronted with the same issue. BIOS checksum etc. I try to recover the BIOS multiple times from the CD to no avail.. every time it fails.

I was kinda clutching at straws now so decided to clear existing BIOS data by removing the battery and moving the jumper to clear the BIOS. After resetting the jumper and replacing the battery I now get nothing on screen at all.

It’s quite bizarre.. everything seems to be connected properly, all the fans are spinning and the CD-ROM spins like it normally would during post but there is just nothing being displayed.

I must say I’ve totally drawn a blank on what the problem could be other than a hardware fault with the BIOS chip or something similar.

Do you think (from the limited information I have given) that the machine is recoverable from here? .. or is it basically an RMA job? How possible is it to get a new BIOS chip to replace the old one if that is indeed the fault?

Any info and help you have give will be a real bonus folks… as all I really have here at the moment is a quite large and rather expensive paper weight.

decto · 24 Feb 2007 at 21:29

Hi,

When the data in the volitile section of the BIOS gets corrupted you'll get a checksum error. This does not usually mean the BIOS or the mainboard has gone bad.

All that it's saying is 'hey dude I lost the settings'

All that is usually is needed in this case is to press the usual key to enter the BIOS and then exit the BIOS by saving settings.

Assuming you are flashing the BIOS from a recovery floppy

Turn everything off.

Unplug any excess hardware so you just have, HDD, CD, sound card, etc

Clear the CMOS

Follow the BIOS recovery flash proceedure

If it works and you get the Checksum error, then enter the BIOS and exit by saving settings

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MaareK · 25 Feb 2007 at 15:38

Thanks Decto, although I've hit a road block following your advice.

I can no longer get the video card to display anything on the monitor.
I've unplugged all the hardware apart from the essentials, CPU, RAM and GFX Card.

I've tried it on a different VDU and get the same results, so that's not what's at fault either.

Kinda stumped for ideas now.. apart from clearing the BIOS and trying again.

FYI : I lost video after rebooting from a BIOS clear for the first time and has never returned since then.

MaareK · 25 Feb 2007 at 16:37

I have an update :
I've isolated the fault to a stick of RAM. I found that after removing one of the RAM sticks I got the display and my BIOS back. After swaping the sticks about I get the following Results.

Stick A in Slot 1 : Get BIOS, Vista boots fine.
Stick B in Slot 1 : Get BIOS, Vista does a physical mem dump when booting (in safe mode or otherwise)
Stick A in Slot 1 + Stick B in Slot 2 (original setup) : BIOS Checksum error and goes straight into the BIOS recovery tool.
Stick B in Slot 1 + Stick A in Slot 2 : Get BIOS, Vista does a physical mem dump when booting (in safe mode or otherwise)

Soooo.. not a faulty motherboard but faulty RAM instead? .Stick B certainly seems to be at fault here. I still don't know what might have caused this in the first place.. everything on this machine has been working very solidly for a few months now.