MSI 970A-G43 PLUS post error fix works across several of the 970 series

[Ken Munk]

I own a "few" MSI motherboards and, ONCE AGAIN!!! *fist in the air*, ran into that pesky 9C A2 99 post code and no boot.  I've run into a few of these issues before in the past, the last time I used it as an excuse to upgrade the motherboard to another "lying around" (it was a salvaged miner).  Now mind you, I can understand the amount of stress that having that post code can cause you at this moment, I imagine you're already having the same issue.  Now BEFORE you go buy another board or go scream at some poor chap on the phone about your rather unproductive board, please take a moment to try this.  Step one, take a deep 8 second breath (NAVY seals suggest 4 but I like overkill) hold that breath for 4 seconds, and slowly breath out for 20 seconds.  Good.  If you're not calm enough just remember, panicking just breaks shit, so shut up.  

 

Step one:

If you have not taken the side panel off your case, please do so now.

 

Step two:

Please Please Please! Unplug the power, I've had a few coworkers (ahem and myself) zapped by a few thousand watts because of neglectful power management.  

 

Step three:

Gently remove the expensive piece of room heating or hardware goddess from the pcie sockets of your machine.  If you have a custom water loop, I mourn for your day.

 

Step four:

Get a very conductive screw driver and very carefully bridge the circuit between the pins of JBAT1 (Jumper Battery 1).  As a few of my buddies like to do, you could alternatively remove the battery and then re-seat the CMOS battery doing the literal same exact thing.  This will reset the CMOS of your board and force the machine to go to bios.  From there you can find your boot medium and assign it as the designated boot device.  If you have multiple drives like myself, do yourself the favor and disable booting from the other drives.  This controls any potential headaches that having 10 or 20 bootable devices on the board can bring. 

 

Step five:

If you are of age, crack open your victory beer.  You've successfully troubleshooted the corrupt boot sequence of your motherboard.  Now before you finish your beer, how the hell did the boot sequence get corrupt in the first place?

 

Summary: The 9C A2 99 seems to be an error associated with the boot sequence, or at least that was the solution to my problem across 3 different board and 7 configurations.  It's not the end of the world, but it certainly kills at least 10 minutes of my day in getting the 2 lb chunks of heat pipe off of my pcie sockets.  Maybe I'll salvage a power switch from one of my decommissioned machines for such a situation.