The computer time was not up to date for the pass one week or so, and I wondered what was wrong with my PC. Usually if the time was not keeping, it meant that the CR2032 flat button battery in the Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard was either weak or dead. So I went out to get myself a new battery.
Changing the battery wasn’t so difficult. Just unscrewed the screws holding the side panel, slide it out, with a torch and mini screwdriver, I pried the old battery out and replaced with the new CR2032 battery that I bought. Closed back the casing and fire up the computer.
As usual a warning came because the BIOS CMOS settings was cleared, so I entered the BIOS setting page to re-adjust the time and did other minor settings like boot priority of storage device. Saved and rebooted the PC.
That’s when the screen just remained black as though I was staring at dark matter out in space. Not even any warnings or beeping at all! I looked at the PC; the drives were running and all seemed alright. Tried to reboot but it didn’t work. Maybe I set something wrong in the BIOS settings? I thought. So I pulled out the battery again to clear the CMOS and rebooted.
This time the welcome screen showed up, and I could re-enter the BIOS again. This time I just readjusted the time and reboot to see what happens. And there it went, the blank screen again! Funny. I cleared the CMOS one more time and this time I didn’t even enter the BIOS and let the boot process played itself out after the warning page. A sigh of relief when the usual Windows startup screen showed up.
So I concluded that the BIOS was definitely faulty. It can’t be written to; if it did it just got corrupted and would not run. Though I could still boot, the time will reset back to factory settings, and my system was not running at optimum.
I have a few options here. Either I sent the motherboard back for warranty claim, if it was claimable (it has a three year warranty, but may not cover BIOS damage, however I was very sure I didn’t touch the BIOS since I last configure it when I bought it last year), or get myself a new AMD motherboard, or live with this irritating situation. If I claim it might take several weeks before I get back the motherboard and left me without a desktop PC to use, but if I just buy a new one I could use my computer straight away.
First thing first was to call up Gigabyte office in Malaysia and see what the procedure was. Since the motherboard was more than one year old, I could not send it over to ALL IT for warranty claim. I have to contact Gigabyte agent directly. If I have to bring over my whole PC, I will need to take out my precious data first. Not wise to have people looking through my work and private and confidential stuff.
Looks like one of those days. They don’t make things like they use too, and electronic equipment gets more and more sensitive with each new make and model. And the defective rate is rather high at about 5%. Just a matter of luck (or bad luck?) whether your digital equipment did not function at par.
I will have to consider what to do next…
you might hav accidently set some settings wrongly either in the BIOS or the jumpers.
because, like mine, if it detects some too extreme OC in the BIOS, it’ll display an error saying previous overclocking failed. so that might be what that is resetting your bios everytime.
well…well…well
who was the one asking me to buy gigabyte or asus.
i’m not even sure whether mine will last. heh
anyway, back to your case, did you check the connections? there might be smth loose. is everything inserted correctly. probably you overlooked smth when u were changing the battery? accidently knocked over some jumpers?
any other things loose? RAM, PSU, sata, PCI cards?
there should be a master reset button somewhere on the mobo, maybe you can try that also.