Hi, I feel like this could be posted in a better place but I'm from Australia and there's no local forums I can post on.
Recently I upgraded my motherboard from an ASUS Prime A320M-K (my original board which I gave to my dad for his build) to a GIGABYTE GA-AX370-Gaming K3 (rev 1.0 from Amazon Black Friday). About a day after the board was installed, I noticed a problem where I could not access my BIOS, but could access Windows 10 as normal. Here's the rundown:
1. Whenever I boot my PC, the initial splash screen appears as normal.
2. If I don't press anything, it continues to the Windows 10 desktop without any issues, and the rest of my system works fine.
3. If I press the DELETE (BIOS) or END (Q-Flash), I see the first message and the menu softlocks. In the case of the BIOS, the screen reads "Cleared CMOS: Information - please change your settings" (or something of those lines. Keep in mind this appeared before I cleared the CMOS, see below), while Q-Flash proceeds to the initial "update or save BIOS" menu. In both cases, no keys work and in order to exit I have to press the reset button on my case. I know it's softlocked and not frozen because the clock on the top-right of the BIOS progresses as normal.
The only cause I can think of was some error in updating my BIOS from factory F2 to the F31 release just before it happened. Before this process, I did not have this issue and overclocking worked fine. I wasn't watching so I couldn't tell whether the installation worked or whether the power cut out. I'm a bit hesitant to completely rely on this factor though, as I'm pretty sure a failed BIOS installation bricks the board entirely, yet I can still use Windows normally (currently posting this from the PC in question). In the initial Q-Flash screen, my BIOS version is still referred to as F2.
Here are some solutions I tried, to no avail:
- Restarting in the Windows start menu.
- Shutting down, cutting the power for a few minutes, and turning it on again.
- Clearing the CMOS (removing the battery for 10 or so minutes, and putting it back in).
- Booting without the CMOS battery installed.
Here are my PC specs if they help:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X.
- Cooler: AMD Wraith Spire (from Ryzen 5 1600).
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-AX370-Gaming K3 Rev. 1.0.
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x16GB DDR4-2666.
- SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 250GB.
- HDD: Seagate BarraCuda 1TB 7200 RPM.
- GPU: GALAX GeForce GTX 1070 EX.
- Case: Deepcool Tesseract SW ATX Mid-Tower.
- PSU: Deepcool DP-DE580-BK (may be the culprit but I'm currently not in a position to replace it, due to my inability to install PSU cables from scratch).
- Displays: 1x1080p 144Hz + 1x1440p 60Hz.
I feel like there's some super-simple solution that I'm missing (hell, I'm hoping that's the case), but I'll keep this thread updated if I find anything. Google didn't give me anything relevant, at least from my searches, but I'm fine with LMGTFY replies too as long as something comes up lol.