Ooops - help please with BIOS

[AGxM]

I'd did something rather stupid last night and I'm wondering if reseting my cmos will sort it?

Pc was running like a good 'un but the HDMI wasn't being detected by my television and so I was playing with the onboard Nvidia graphics settings and suddenly the screen went black (the PC is plugged into my Sony television), I had obviously changed the screen output somehow, so I went and got my normal TFT screen and plugged that in via the normal monitor plugs - no joy!

I reset computer and the windows boot screen came up on both displays and then just as windows openned properly poof blank screen - so obviously I had changed the screen output in windows but had no way of changing it back as I couldn't see anyhting.

So I reset again and changed some bits in the bios (dumb I know) and now the pc boots and goes into Windows ok but I cannot see anything and so cannot see anything to access the bios and change it back.

Will reseting the cmos help? Should I bin motherboard and start again, and if so will that effect my windows licence?

Asus M2NPV-VM board with Athlon 4400+ X2

[peterb]

Reboot windows in safe mode - that should enable you to reset the settings. Resetting the CMOS settings is unlikely to achieve anything - by thye time Windows boots, the CMOS settings have done their job.

[AGxM]

Reboot windows in safe mode - that should enable you to reset the settings. Resetting the CMOS settings is unlikely to achieve anything - by thye time Windows boots, the CMOS settings have done their job.

The trouble is I can't see anything on the screen so even if I get into bios or safe mode I can't see what I'm doing - gawd knows what I did

[Salazaar]

Can I just clarify something, does anything come up on the screen at all during the boot process or is it just a problem when it starts to load windows?

[AGxM]

Salazaar, nothing comes up at all now I messed with BIOS. Previous to that I did get the mobo bootup screen and the windows splash screen before the screen went black. I think if I reset the bios via removing the cmos battery, I can then hopefully enter windows safe mode and giggle settings back but at the moment I have no 'seen' access to the bios or to accessing safe mode.

[Salazaar]

That sounds like a pretty good plan, you could also try just powering down the system from the socket/PSU for a minute of so. There's a strange phenomenom that seems to happen to some Asus boards which stops them rebooting properly some times.

[AGxM]

Thanks Salazaar. Yep If you don't exit Windows properly you have to switch off the PSU at the back so been doing that - will pop open the cover this weekend and give the cmos thing a go. Scared as I'm a very green techie but I'm sure it's fairly simple lol

[-iceblade^]

for future, don't faff about in the BIOS if you aren't certain of what you're doing... you could very easily kill your PC

[AGxM]

Just thought I'd update you all. Did CMOS thing, entered Windows in Safe Mode and deleted VGA drivers and all ok (thus far) now waiting for drivers to download to re-install.