Gigabyte Z77 D3H BIOS flash failure

[VimesUK]

Thanks :)

I will leave the board overnight and see what happens in the morning. At the very worse I do not mind returning the board to my supplier with a dead flash, as tha tis just one of those things. But I'm less likely to wish to try something which could kill the board which could only compromise the warranty. Unless I'm sure about shorting the pins I would prefer to return it.

Morning brings a whole new day :)

Thank you again for your help :)

[VimesUK]

This board does not have a BIOS switch ( I will know better next time).

As far as I'm concerned the board is dead since the successful flash of BIOS 16a yesterday. In a way I was annoyed at myself about becoming too complacent on flashing a newer BIOS assuming because it had worked before so many times that it would continue to work. Regardless of me seeing two soldered BIOS chips on the motherboard there doe not seem to be a way to get it to boot from the backup chip. I suppose that is why you pay extra for the board with the switch.

I have tried most of the morning following the advice in this thread (thanks for the help) but now the board is boxed and the receipt sourced and to be returned.

Again I am just mentioning how vulnerable you can be when flashing a BIOS, even if it does go fine, with verification, during that process.

My system is being built back up now and maybe I will not be as likely to flash a BIOS just for the sake of doing that in the future.!?

[wazza300]

it should have worked fine if you used qflash,did you try whats in this guide to envoke the back up bios?

BIOS Flashing - A "How To ~ Qflash Guide"

[VimesUK]

If you are referring to the section

BIOS Recover Method Via Manually Invoking BACKUP BIOS Auto-Recovery
Using Power Supply - On/Off Switch

then Yes I did.

The best that I can get a very short click sound from the speaker. By removing all the RAM I get the usual long series of beeps.

I did and always have used Q-Flash. It read the BIOS file and flashed and then successfully verified it. I had previously flashed the board without any issue before but this time with the Z77D3H.F16a BIOS it just did not work.

[wazza300]

did you try with just one ram stick installed and did you leave cmos battery out overnight?

could also take out your graphic card and test with onboard graphics just to rule out gpu and mb bios incompatibility ect

[VimesUK]

I left the battery out of the board overnight and I tried either one (but only one) of the known working sticks of memory.

I removed my GTX 670 and tried just the onboard GPU.

EDIT: Now I have got the main PC up and going I will try again with the board to see if resurrection is possible, fingers crossed :)

EDIT 2:

And so it starts...

[VimesUK]

I am now a believer of life after death, resurrection forever....

after finally getting the key combinations correct for the boot procedure...



and then....



a great many thanks for the help to Acebmxer and wazza300 :)

I could not believe it when I finally managed to get the power switch and PSU power combo correct and then I saw the back up bios screen image telling me that the main bios is corrupted and that it was restoring it..!

My faith in a dual bios has been restored, like my board :)

A great result and thanks ever so much for your help.

[wazza300]

hooorahhh for dual bios's

[Acebmxer]

Congrats on saving your board. Were you able to successfully flash the bios again?

[VimesUK]

Even though I had downloaded the F16a BIOS I decided against using it. Instead I flashed the previous beta BIOS Z77D3H.F15f for no other reason than I know it worked.
Whether the F16a would have worked fine or not I decided that I did not need to try and risk that again for no perceivable gain.

I appreciate the help I have received, so again thanks for that, but this has served to remind me of the real risks involved in flashing a board and how complacent I had become in doing that each and every time a new beta BIOS was out, just like a release of a new version of a GPU driver.

Thankfully mine has been recovered but I'm sure that they don't all end this way.

I had just found my old BIOS chip that I bought from...

Motherboard-biosflash.co.uk | BiosflashUK.com | Flash BIOS Repair | Flash BIOS Replacement

...for my DFI board and hotflash from a few years back - happy times when they were socketed.!