bios upgrade downgrade woes asus p5n-e sli

Hello all I need some help.

Please check my system for full spec.

I have basically been tinkering with my bios on my asus p5n-e sli board and caused it to lock up. I upgraded to the latest revision of the bios with little trouble version 0703 from 0608, and the comp had been running fine for a week or so however I lost all my overclock settings from 0608, but decided to leave it untill tonight.

I prefered the bios setting in 0608 so using the asus ez flash method that i used to upgrade my bios I wanted to put the 0608 back on. I carried out the same procedure as the upgrade and the bios said it checked out fine, then it said it wanted to restart.

However after the restart I get the post beep the screen comes on but only as far as the asus default boot screen and then the system hangs. I have tried switching on off repeatedly, turning of power for 20 mins and restarting and removed the bios battery from the pc but all to no avail, i still cant get past this boot screen. How can I either reset my board or get it to boot up. I have some important data that needs to be handed in on thursday so worst comes to the worst ill buy a new motherboard and plug in my old hd to get it off, however i just want to get the pc working again, any help is much appreciated.

Thanks Tom

Unfortunately I can't offer any help, but you have my complete sympathies mate. I recently zeroed the BIOS on a perfectly good Commando board. After all else failed, my solution was just to buy a new one. An expensive lesson in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Hope you have better luck than I. Someone suggested that if you have a copy of the BIOS put it on a USB drive and let the system try and find it at POST, as some boards are designed to do in the event of POST failure. (Not a CD or HD, but a USB.) Didn't work for me, but you never know...

Quote:

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if it aint broke dont fix it

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probably the wisest words ever spoken. When you put the bios file on the usb stick should it be the only thing on there and should it be contained within a folder or just on the stick?

Have you tried clearing the CMOS via the jumper (or switch possibly)? That's what people mean when they're asking you to take the battery out of the motherboard. You also need to leave the computer plugged into a turned off wall socket and hold down the on button for a few seconds to drain the capacitors.


If that doesn't work, you can try to get a replacement BIOS chip, but you'll need a special tool to switch the chips over.

P5N-E along with many recent Asus mobos doesn't have a socketed BIOS chip so you have to RMA the whole mobo rather than just swapping a chip.
Unfortunately this story is all too common with the Asus updater (not unique as failed flashes happen on other boards too with their "easy" flash utilities).
Floppy/USB memory stick & DOS for me!

well i think thats it now, its fried :(

I did the cmos jumper aswell and still no luck, so theres no way forward that i can think about but send it back. Do I contact asus directly or the company i bought it off. Bare in mind that I bought it as a pre built pc from ebay, but they are a registered company so they should do rma.

I was thinking of buying a better motherboard anyway as that was the only thing letting me down. Which would people recommend for around the £100 mark, capable of running pc8500, sli if possible but not a necessity and most of all STABILITY!!

thanks for all the replies so far, ive got a connector coming that should help me retrieve the data so all is not lost.