So, maybe this is slightly off-topic but it may bite you some time. I'm not sure if two events are related so I will mention both. I leave my machine on pretty much 24/7. It is an ASUS P8Z77WS motherboard with an I7 3770 CPU. I bought the motherboard a few years ago to bring my horsepower up to snuff for SDRC mainly. It was a cheaper alternative to a late model machine. Anyway, a few months back the machine went wonky and would not boot. It turned out that something had trashed my bios settings, including the choice of boot drive. I fixed that and went on my merry way but I was nagged by what had caused this. Yesterday evening we had a power failure hitting about 5000 residences and when it came back on, the computer would not boot, even into the bios. The Q code was 98 which indicates that the boot process was trying to find the keyboard (console device). I thrashed about removing USB devices, powering up and down, and so on until it finally booted up. The last thing I did was remove the mouse receiver from the usb socket so I figured it had been zapped. But when I tried to reboot without it, same problem came back. To make a long story short, the problem was the BIOs itself. I had to re-flash it. Not upgrade mind you. Just reload what was there before. Apparently the flash memory device holding the bios was corrupted. Now it boots every time again. This is a drawback of flash memory. It is not 100% stable. I thought they had ECC in them to deal with this stuff but ECC can only do so much. In my searches of the web I saw many people with various motherboards reporting the same q code with a number of different proposed fixes. People rarely follow up when they fix something to let you know what finally did the job so I was many attempts into it before I found something that worked.
Anyway, SDRC is back up and running my overnight recording. Hallelujah!
Tony
Flash woes
Re: Flash woes
Happy for you Tony, personally i would grabbed this event to convince my wife that i need a new PC
Serious now, did you replaced the battery on the mb? a bad battery can be the problem.
Serious now, did you replaced the battery on the mb? a bad battery can be the problem.
- Simon G4ELI
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Re: Flash woes
I have a very nice i7-5860K (I think) which cost a lot of money. Sadly the motherboard appears to be a bit poorly - doesn't always boot.
I've never had a CPU die on me.
I've never had a CPU die on me.
Re: Flash woes
"I've never had a CPU die on me."
Quite a long time ago I had a collection of compatible CPUs and motherboards.
One stopped working. I moved the CPU to a working board, it did not work.
I put another CPU into the original board, it did not work.
I do not know what failed first but I had the situation that the failed CPU damaged a motherboard in such a way that the motherboard would then kill another CPU..
73 Alan
Quite a long time ago I had a collection of compatible CPUs and motherboards.
One stopped working. I moved the CPU to a working board, it did not work.
I put another CPU into the original board, it did not work.
I do not know what failed first but I had the situation that the failed CPU damaged a motherboard in such a way that the motherboard would then kill another CPU..
73 Alan
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- Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2020 2:38 pm
Re: Flash woes
Good point about the battery. They seem to last forever but this board is pretty old. I will replace it.
Edit: I just remembered that this might explain the first issue where my settings were lost, but not the second. The BIOS is not stored in the CMOS but in a flash device which does not need battery backup.
Re: Flash woes
Yeah i thought about that too, but that was after my reply
Can't hurt though to replace that battery after so many years.
Can't hurt though to replace that battery after so many years.