BIOS and Q-Flash soft-locking on Gigabyte X370

[7pt]

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.

[Mark Kaine]

... You will probably have to reinstall your old BIOS,  but I'm not actually sure how if you can't even access it... 

 

It might be a new BIOS chip will be required, if you have a PC repair store anywhere nearby you can try asking there. 

 

Otherwise I'm out of ideas... Definitely seems like a failed BIOS update problem. 

[keskparane]

Did you 

Quote

Note : Update AMD Chipset Driver 18.50.16.01 or later version before update this BIOS.

Since you skipped 30? If not I'd try that first.

 

You mention some very convoluted steps to clear cmos. Here's what you need to do...

Unplug the machine.

Press the power button. This is to drain any residual charges left in capacitors.

Short the cmos jumper for a couple of seconds as per instructions.

 

Hope PC doesn't catch fire. We've got enough of those already.

 

[7pt]

10 hours ago, keskparane said:

Did you 

Since you skipped 30? If not I'd try that first.

Forgot to mention that. I uninstalled the chipset driver from my A320 board and installed the latest one for X370 (although they're probably the same thing) before updating the BIOS. I didn't try the CMOS jumper method so I'll update the thread after doing so.

 

EDIT: I don't know much about jumpers so I used the paperclip method described here. Unfortunately the issue persists. I know the CMOS was cleared through my original method though (removing the battery), since there were changes before the issue (CPU overclock and virtualisation status) which were reverted as of yesterday.

Edited December 7, 2019 by 7pt
Elaboration in previous edit

[seagate_surfer]

I have removed the silver battery for one whole day and that seems to have worked for me...

[7pt]

22 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

I have removed the silver battery for one whole day and that seems to have worked for me...

Hmm, my family is going on holidays in a couple weeks so I'd be able to leave the PC at home and try that. If that doesn't work, I might look into a new BIOS chip. Not much urgency though.