What does rewriting bios means and can I do it myself?

[Flaccid Sausage]

This post isn't about troubleshooting, the problem is known, I need help to decide if I can fix it myself.

This is an Asus x556uq laptop, about 3 years old. This is probably unrelated, but it had CPU problems.

A couple days ago I was rebooting from Linux to windows and in the middle a bios screen with an error message, it said to plug in the power. I did and then it when completely unresponsive. In hindsight the bios was probably updating, at the time I thought it froze, so I held down the power button for 8 s. After that when I powered it on, nothing happens the screen is black, the cooling fan seems to stay on idle.

The next day I took it to a repair shop and a couple days later they said, "the bios needs to be rewritten", I couldn't get any more information what they mean by that. My question for you reader, is this plainly means clearing the bios / removing the cmos battery, or the actual eeprom (or whatever bios chip) must be re-written / replaced. The thing is they quoted about 200 USD. The laptop cost 1000 USD new and I was thinking about replacing it. However apart from this bios problem it was working fine and wanted to give it away. I am incredibly conflicted what to do, all input are welcome.

[Yug35h]

31 minutes ago, Flaccid Sausage said:

This post isn't about troubleshooting, the problem is known, I need help to decide if I can fix it myself.

 

This is an Asus x556uq laptop, about 3 years old. This is probably unrelated, but it had CPU problems.

 

A couple days ago I was rebooting from Linux to windows and in the middle a bios screen with an error message, it said to plug in the power. I did and then it when completely unresponsive. In hindsight the bios was probably updating, at the time I thought it froze, so I held down the power button for 8 s. After that when I powered it on, nothing happens the screen is black, the cooling fan seems to stay on idle.

 

The next day I took it to a repair shop and a couple days later they said, "the bios needs to be rewritten", I couldn't get any more information what they mean by that. My question for you reader, is this plainly means clearing the bios / removing the cmos battery, or the actual eeprom (or whatever bios chip) must be re-written / replaced. The thing is they quoted about 200 USD. The laptop cost 1000 USD new and I was thinking about replacing it. However apart from this bios problem it was working fine and wanted to give it away. I am incredibly conflicted what to do, all input are welcome.

 

Power your computer off. Then press and hold the power button until your computer powers back on. Continue to hold the power button until the computer powers off again. When you power it back on, it should boot from the backup BIOS.

 

If fail, then replace the BIOS chip. This is only an option if your motherboard has a slotted DIP or PLCC BIOS chip. If the BIOS chip is soldered to the motherboard, your only option will be to replace the motherboard 

[Flaccid Sausage]

1 minute ago, Yug35h said:

Power your computer off. Then press and hold the power button until your computer powers back on. Continue to hold the power button until the computer powers off again. When you power it back on, it should boot from the backup BIOS.

 

If fail, then replace the BIOS chip. This is only an option if your motherboard has a slotted DIP or PLCC BIOS chip. If the BIOS chip is soldered to the motherboard, your only option will be to replace the motherboard 

Did power cycling on it, but no matter what no output was on the display. Even tryed it on the following morning. As far as I know the x556 doesn't have slotted BIOS chip, so thats unfortunately not an option.

[Yug35h]

2 minutes ago, Flaccid Sausage said:

Did power cycling on it, but no matter what no output was on the display. Even tryed it on the following morning. As far as I know the x556 doesn't have slotted BIOS chip, so thats unfortunately not an option.

Than the only way is to change your motherboard and it cost way more less than buying a new laptop.

[Kilrah]

Or reprogram the chip, which will likely require unsoldering it and having access to a programmer.

[Flaccid Sausage]

Hello,

I'm writing this for those following this thread or found it in the future. After talking more with the repair guys and doing a more thorough search on the internet, I concluded at least in this case I will probably not be able to repair my laptop myself. It seems losing power during bios update kills the bios chip or at least ruins the data on it. There is a good chance the chip itself is fine, it just needs to be wiped and the code written back onto it. It is the kind of problem, if you need to search the forum for solution, you probably don't have the equipment to fix it.

 

Thank you all for your input.

Consider this thread resulted.