face wizard corrupted my bios

[darkantrax07]

last night i tried to use gigabyte's face wizard application to change my boot up screen. that software is in my gigabyte cd, so i became conscious on how that works. i first accessed the onboard bios logo and saved it to my pc. then i change it with my black and white logo i made. then i click AUTO and i started to flash the logo. i got series of errors when flahing. the first error says like "error 1 ..." then "error 2 ...". i saw about 20 errors when flashing. and it stopped and vanish a 87%. then i restarted my pc. it's not booting, i can only see my hard disk and power lights. i tried to remove the battery for 5 mins, no changes. then i connected the jumper, nothing changes again. i even tried to remove the battery for 20mins and connected the pins for 20 mins. nothing happened.

is there still a way to revive my motherboard? i'm from the Philippines and my mobo was bought by my uncle in Taiwan about 1.4 yrs ago.

specs:
pentium dual core 1.8ghz, GA-945pl-s3p rev 6.6 motherboard, 2 160gb wd sata, 2 dvd dl optical drive, 8400gs gigabyte videocard.

[profJim]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Do you have a speaker hooked up to your mobo's speaker pins? If yes, are you getting any beeps from the speaker?
When you "connected the jumpers", were these the clear CMOS pins? How long did you leave the CMOS jumpers connected?

Before the failure, did you have a floppy drive configured as the first boot device? If yes, you might be able to perform a blind flash using a floppy that contains your standard bios.

Here are some things that might help:

1) With your computer off, turn off the power to the psu by using the psu's on/off switch.
2) Unplug the external power cord from the psu.
3) Press and hold the computer case's on/off switch for 10 seconds.
4) Leave your computer in this state for 15 minutes or longer.
5) Hook everything back up and turn on your computer.
You might have to perform these steps several times.

The following procedure might help;

The Minimalist Boot:
Disconnect everything that isn't required to boot, including:
Hard Drives, floppy drives, cd/dvd drives
Mouse
All USB devices including the mouse and keyboard
All add-in PCI cards.

You want to boot only with your cpu, PS2 keyboard, video card and only 1 memory module. That's it.

While you're trying these steps, you might get a bios checksum error message. This is a good sign. If you get a corrupted bios error message, the only solution I know of is to perform a blind flash.

[darkantrax07]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

yes i have, it's a small black speaker. when i tried to remove all of my rams. it beeps.

yeah it is the cmos pins, i connected it by using the jumper on IDE hdd. about 20mins or longer.

hard disk is the first boot.

i already tried removing the MB power cord, psu power cord. nothing happened. i tried pressing the power button for a long time for several times. but i'll do them again when i got home.

i'm gonna try the minimalist boot. if nothing appears on screen. i can't make a blind flash?

thanx.

[profJim]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

According to Lsdme's Bios Flashing Guide, you can only perform a blind flash if your floppy is already configured in the bios as the first boot device. If your first boot device is USB-HDD, it might work with a bootable USB drive, but you would probably need to have USB Legacy Storage Detect enabled. Check out his guide for more information.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Do you have a floppy drive ALREADY Connected, and set as first boot device? If so then you can use the method outlined here in post #2 to blind flash your BIOS >>>

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/bios-flashing-how-qflash-guide-27576/

If you do not, then you may just have to RMA the board. Let me know if you need info on how to set that up. If you have owned the board more then 3 years you may not be able to RMA though.

Should you ever want to use facewizard again in the future it is fine, just do not use it to actually do the flash. Make your BIOS in facewizard and save it to file, then flash from Qflash

[darkantrax07]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

i tried removing all parts except 1 ram, vcard, cpu. nothing happened.

for what i know, usb legacy i enabled. i'm gonna try booting on usb. if that won't work, maybe i will just play on it an do the pins shorting method.

and i'm gonna buy a new one.

i will never use windows-based flashers. i don't know why gigabyte made those things. they're just MB destroyers.

and i can't RMA it because i bought it on abroad.

thanx.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

It will not boot (Or use for BIOS Recovery) from USB anyway, legacy enabled or not. You have to have floppy already setup for this instance

Pin shorting would only help if you had Dual Physical BIOS chips, but you do not

When did you buy it, and was it bought new? Where you bought it does not matter so much as to if it was new and how long ago. If it was new, and under 3 years then you can RMA it

[Psycho101]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

If you are familiar with your board and menu screens, you could choose to boot from floppy disk from the boot menu. As long as you know the hotkey to access it, and how many times to press the down arrow to highlight the FDD, it should work.

If you have a USB stick that has been formatted bootable, then it will also work from there.

Here's a nice little utility to make a USB stick bootable. The link also contains a download link for Win98 boot files.

Good luck. Blind flashing isn't fun. I've done it before trying to enable locked pixel pipelines on a X800GT.

[darkantrax07]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

i plan to buy a new on. it's a gigabyte s2 series. the only one i saw here.

my dead MB is 1.5 years old. maybe i will rma it when my uncle go back to taiwan again.


thanx.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Good luck on a RMA or deciding on a new board. Sorry to hear you had these problems, good thing though is you can RMA for up to 3 years

You can setup a RMA and just ship it to them if you like, if you need help finding the contact numbers to set that up let me know

[serkanos]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

It will not boot (Or use for BIOS Recovery) from USB anyway, legacy enabled or not. You have to have floppy already setup for this instance

Pin shorting would only help if you had Dual Physical BIOS chips, but you do not

When did you buy it, and was it bought new? Where you bought it does not matter so much as to if it was new and how long ago. If it was new, and under 3 years then you can RMA it

Hi lsdmesap,

I have used the same tools as darkantrax07 to change the bios logo and know have the same issue as he does. You said in your post that pin shorting only would help if you had a dual physical bios chip. Well a have a gigabyte p35-dq6 MB and it should support the dual bios thing. I already tried to clear the cmos without any luck. I'am sill left with blank screen and start up. Computer starts up and firtsly you see the hdd leds going on after this the machine beeps 1 time and after this nothing happens.
Does this mean the MB is fried?

Hope somebody can help me out. Thanks.

[artdrivers]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Did you try repeatedly pressing the end key not del when you first here the beep?

[serkanos]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

yes, tried this also, but no luck. Screen is still blank. I also thought that when maybe entering q flash utlility i will get image on screen, but no
Any other ideas?

[artdrivers]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Check out the article below by Lsdmeasap In it there is an article on "Attempting to Recover From a Bad Flash or Corrupt BootBlock"

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/bios-flashing-how-qflash-guide-27576/

[serkanos]

Re: face wizard corrupted my bios

Have already read it. But I wonder if it works because my pc doenst boot up. My first boot device is not the floppy, does this matter?
And if so I could also try it with a USB stick, but I wonder if it works, and its hard to know if something is happening when you got no image.
Should I try it with USB stick or a floppy? Thanks.