Can this motherboard be revived?

[Angel Blue01]

I was working on refurbishing a system I had built in 2008 with a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2L motherboard, for a new user. After installing Windows, I downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte's Web site. I noticed that the BIOS was still from 2007, so I decided to update it to whatever was the latest version.

 

I rebooted into BIOS setup with the binary BIOS file on a flash drive. To my suprise, although the flash drive was detected by the BIOS update utility as a floppy drive, it refused to read flash drive, it displayed the contents of the drive, formatted in FAT32, as being full of files with junk character file names. I didn't have another flash drive drive around, but I did have a USB floppy drive. I dug out an old floppy disk and copied the bin file to the floppy. The flashing utility did see the disk and read the BIOS update. It took a long time, about 30 minutes, but it did update the BIOS.

 

When I rebooted after updating, the machine won't start up again. I suppose the floppy disk or the drive was bad. To my suprise however, when I turn the machine on, the CPU fan spins up for a few seconds, stops, and spins up again, indefinitely. The system speaker is plugged in and was working, but there are no beep codes or LEDs flashing, which is what I'm used to seeing with low level problems.

 

I took out the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS to defaults, but that didn't make any difference.

 

Is there any chance of saving motherboard/system? I know this is mb is quite old, so losing is not a great loss, but it would be handy to have.

 

Thanks.

[azspeedbullet]

it looks like your screwed. For bios updates, i think it is better if do the update within the current OS you are using. Most bios, have a program that allows you update it without using a floppy or usb device

[Angel Blue01]

it looks like your screwed. For bios updates, i think it is better if do the update within the current OS you are using. Most bios, have a program that allows you update it without using a floppy or usb device

 

:( I was afraid of that. I would have preferred doing it in Windows, but the download consisted of a commandline utility, an autoexec.bat, and the binary file, not what I'd expect from Gigabyte in 2009 (date of that BIOS update)! The manual is useless, it assumes a partially bootable computer, and also says nothing about being able to flash within an installed OS.

[vcfan]

if you know how to solder

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/BIOS-CHIP-GIGABYTE-GA-G33M-S2L-GA-G33M-S2H-/380339845400

[Angel Blue01]

No, I guess its a lost cause.

[Aergan]

Check to see if there's a BIOS reflash on BIOS fail sequence over a designated USB port or FDD header. Some models do have them undocumented in the manual for QA/Test.

 

If it was a popular model, check ebay as you might find a replacement BIOS on the cheap. They are really difficult to remove so you'll likely want the tool as well to avoid damaging the socket.

 

If not, you're looking for a broken model of the same board + BIOS removal tweasers/pliers.

 

EDIT: Ah right, solder job. Ignore the removal tool stuff.