Help - dead Gigabyte P965-DS4

[carbon8ed]

I have a DS4 with OS and all vital stuff on RAID 0+1. PSU is corsair 620 with ATI X1950 Pro gfx and 2 x 1GB Crucial 10th anniversary. The E6600 and GFX are both watercooled.

Tried to overclock the e6600 windows booted at 3.8 and reset machines 'cos I had forgot to plug the mouse in, failed at 4.0GHz but machine recovered and BIOs reset itself. After rebooting the machine stated to come on, but then reset and started to come on and then reset - ad infinitum. Cannot get into BIOS, have to tried to clear the CMOS without success.

Machine is current sat with all power off battery out and clear CMOS pins jumpered - have left it all night to try and clear the CMOS as all other attempts have failed.

But what if it's not the BIOS - what could have dies from a reboot. We have ruled out PSU, all HDD and optical drives, FDD, fans water pump been disconnected at some point and all make no difference.

If I have killed the BIOS or the board - it's an RMA job as the BIOS chips are soldered into the board.

Questions:

Need a reliable and proven method to clear the BIOS
I think BIOS has become frazzled but can't get to back up BIOS because need to be in the BIOS and can't get it to stay on long enough to try and get into the BIOS. - Any options here?
If I get a new board, do I havce to get the P965-DS4 and if so how to I try and get the RAID back - or can I get the P35-DS4 and set up the RAID from there with no loss of data?
If I change the board at all am I stuffed?
What other things do I need to try?

Thanks in adbvance - spent 2-3 hours trying to clear CMOS last night and am flumoxed.

carbon8ed

[MilkMan]

Do you mean a GA-965P-DS4? and which rev. do you have?
Gigabyte motherboards have 2 BIOS, unfortunately I do not know much about O/C.
You should be able to access Gigabyte’s unique features such as the Xpress recovery.

Go to www.gigabyte.eu and find out more.
Otherwise, call Gigabyte UK and speak to the technical team.

You should be able to clear the BIOS manually, using the jumpers on the motherboard – see manual for information.

If you change the motherboard then you will have to re-install the OS.
Because of the different chipsets, but if you stay with the same motherboard then it should all work fine – just a motherboard exchange.

Sorry that I can not be much help, but I’m sure Gigabyte will be able to assist you over the phone.

Good luck

[carbon8ed]

Thanks MilkMan, board is indeed the GA-965P-DS4, rev 1.0 IIRC the Xpress recovery requires that you get into the BIOS which I can't do at the minute.

I have even tried removing the CPU to force the reset of the BIOS to no avail.

I will check the site and contact Gigabyte - I hope the board hasn't died. Backups not an issue, the issue is time lost - oh well.

Hoping it's just a BIOS reset fail as there is a single power off power on cycle mentioned in the FAQ - not repeated - could the BIOS battery be dead?

Cheers again

[peterb]

The bios is normally flash ram, and doesn't require a battery to maintain it - the battery is purely for the CMOS which contains the configuration settings. Flashing the bios usually requires the mfr's utility, but as you say, you need the bios intact to run the utility in the first place. There is no reset of the bios as such - it contains the low level routines for initial access of the hardware.

If you have cleared the CMOS, that should throw you into the CMOS set up program. If it doesn't, there is either a hardware fault on the board, or you have managed to wipe the bios (hard to do).

Either way, seeking mfr advice is a good idea - otherwise if it is newish, you could RMA it - or finally replace it with an identical board in which case you won't have to re-install. Even if thje replacement is identical, but uses a similar chipset, you might be lucky. In the past I have swapped motherboards and Win2K has recognised the new board and continued running OK - or using the rescue function might also fix it.

[carbon8ed]

Thanks peterb, I did mean clear the CMOS rather than the BIOS - I think I'm stuffed because I can't seem to clear the CMOS and I can't seem to get the machine to stay on long enough to allow me to enter the CMOS settings

[Clunk]

This happened with my DS3, I rang gigabyte and they said that it was the cmos that had been corrupted, and the board would need to be replaced.

[carbon8ed]

Thanks Clunk -it's not what I wanted to hear but at least I have an asnwer LOL

Thanks to all who replied with suggestions.

Dam, dam, dam