Had a bit of an oh, shit moment late last night. I’ve been having problems with my PC not coming out of sleep mode properly. My motherboard, an Asus M2A-VM, seemed to be the culprit, so I decided to upgrade its BIOS.
Yeah, that’s usually the beginning of a good oh, shit PC story.
The upgrade process bricked my PC. No display, no drive activity, not one single, solitary beep from the POST. I had to have done something wrong. More to the point, I had to undo it.
Now, modern Asus motherboards have this “crash-free” BIOS thing where you’re allowed a do-over after a failed upgrade. Put a known good BIOS image on a drive and boot the PC, and some lingering ghost of sanity on the motherboard will pull it down and re-flash the BIOS. I found a new image on the Internet, as it wasn’t on the recovery disk where it was supposed to be.
I haven’t had a floppy drive in almost a decade, but I tried putting the image on a USB drive, which didn’t do anything, then burning it to a DVD, which also did nothing. A light came on the DVD, but that was all.
Frantic, I scoured the Internet for answers, and came across a HardOCP thread I can’t link to because it was on another PC and it was late and I’ve forgotten how the hell I found the thread in the first place. But the gist of the thread was, if you’re upgrading an Asus motherboard and it fails, try pulling out the memory and replacing it with one single stick.
What the hell? I had nothing to lose except more sleep. I yanked out all the RAM, put in a single 512MB stick, and it fucking started right up.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it has to do with memory voltages, which are settable on Asus motherboards. Most BIOSes default this to Auto, which is fine until an upgrade changes what the default voltage actually is. To support four sticks of RAM, I had to lock it to 2.1V instead of whatever low-ass default the upgraded BIOS thought it should be. What I found funny was that the upgrade didn’t actually fail, it succeeded, and that was the problem. If it had failed, it probably would have been easier to diagnose and fix.
So, that’s what I did last night instead of sleeping. Still, it could have been worse.
Did I ever mention how much I love the Internet?