Tech help needed. Think i've fried my BIOS...

[Hivetyrant]

Originally posted by Sever: quote: Originally posted by Hivetyrant: First thing I do when the proverbial $hit hits the fan, is reset my BIOS settings, if you are unsure of how to do this with the motherboard (most motherboards have jumper settings to clear the CMOS) then you can do it the old fashion way.... Find the battery on the motherboard, pull er' out and then unplug the power cable from the back of the pc.... Try and turn it on... Depending on your system, this will have various effects, though it should wipe all savings that are kept in static memory. so now you can plug it back in and see if it runs at all....

Sounds extreme. What will if it mean if it don't go? (What will it have achieved if it does go?) [/QUOTE]If it doesn't go, it could mean two things.
1) It didn't reset the settings (which will be hard to find out)
2) It did reset the settings and you now have a potentially big problem

If it does, it's good news, as its not hard to change the settings in BIOS to what you want.

[Sever]

It would appear it's either option 1 or 2... *Ed: of the "no go" scenario, that is.

[ 05-03-2006, 07:46 AM: Message edited by: Sever ]

[Hivetyrant]

Right, now we head into the fun part....

I need to know all the hardware in your machine, that means everything...
*Video card
*Ram(how much, how many sticks)
*sound card
*motherboard
Also, do you have your original instruction maual that came with the PC/motherboard?

[Sever]

Am i right in assuming it's beyond the help of a restore disk?

[Sever]

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: Right, now we head into the fun part.... I need to know all the hardware in your machine, that means everything... *Video card *Ram(how much, how many sticks) *sound card *motherboard Also, do you have your original instruction maual that came with the PC/motherboard?

Gimme a sec...

Okay, Athlon 1.8ghz, 128mb Radeon 9200 SE, 2x 512mb RAM, on-board sound. That's the easy stuff. I have the original motherboard manual. Trouble is, that motherboard is no longer in the machine. It was originally a P4 system and was upgraded a couple of years ago by the local guru. I'm not sure of the motherboard type and can't locate the manual for it (if i even got one, it may be in a box of computer stuff i carted round to my place when i set my new rig up.

I'm going to have to time-out for now, Hive. I'll keep digging around for the docs for the motherboard tonight. If there's any more more info you need, let me know. I'm using my sister's laptop with BlueTooth wireless so i'm still able to log on. Hopefully i'll have a more comprehensive hardware list tomorrow. Thanks for the help, mate! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 05-03-2006, 08:37 AM: Message edited by: Sever ]

[Hivetyrant]

Originally posted by Sever: Am i right in assuming it's beyond the help of a restore disk?

If you are not getting any display at all, then yes, its beyond restore disk help

[Harkoliar]

worse case scenario is you getting a new motherboard. but hives "remove batterY and put it back on" is also what i would do to manually reset the bios.

[Sever]

I've found the Motherboard manual. It's a K7 Triton GA-7V4M400M with a VIA KM400 chipset. There's a few interesting tidbits in the manual so i'll read through and see if i can pinpont exactly what went wrong.

[Sever]

Update on the situation: The bios chip, and therefore the motherboard, is indeed stuffed. I took it around to the local guru who installed a new mboard but he also reinstalled a copy of XP Home over the existing copy of XP Pro! Basically, it goes once again, but all the drivers need to be downloaded and installed again. Most of the data that was on the hard drive is still present except for the stuff that was in two password protected user accounts. One of them mine, the other was my sister's. The accounts show up in the documents and settings folder but can't be opened. The non-password accounts all seem to be fine.

My question: Is the data lost forever? If not, how in blazes do i get the stuff back?

You here, Hive? I could really use your brains on this one.

[Bozos of Bones]

Damn... I am too late.
You could have saved alot of money if you took it to a true guru that isn't interested in your money. I had once been around such a guru and he told me that if one were to ever lose BIOS completely, but without it being completely fried, it is still not too late. Two identical motherboards can be connected together, and one's BIOS can be flashed over to the other's(kinda like intelligent switches, routers and the like). I have no idea what one uses in the process, unfortunately, so if this proves to be false, don't blame me.
As for the encrypted files, you can try cracking them. Be prepared for that taking the better part of a week, tho [img]tongue.gif[/img] Without actually being there and seeing it for myself, I can't really say what else to do to it. Maybe you can find somewhere one of your old registry back-ups, or whatever. Depends on what you do with your machine.