Reviving bricked BIOS

[Acizco]

Hello all, I registered here because I believe that I could find someone here who is able to help me with this problem I am currently dealing with...

 

 

First of all, my PC specs:

ASRock P67 Extreme4

Intel Core i5 2500K

2x4GB G.Skill Sniper 1866MHz DDR3

EVGA GTX 560 Ti SC

Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA III + Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA II

Random Samsung DVD drive

XFX Core Edition 550W PSU

Win 7 Ultimate x64

 

 

A little back story of how I ended up in this situation...

 

I had issues with USB device LEDs staying on while my PC was completely shut down. I thought this was an issue in BIOS settings, but it ended up being OS side issue once I finally figured it out. Before I did, I decided to flash my BIOS to the newest version. This new BIOS (P3.10) included Ivy Bridge CPU support. ASRock website says "Supports Intel's 3rd Generation CPU". It DOES NOT say that Sandy Bridge CPU's are NOT supported. So after the flash, I started to have boot problems. In rare occasions it would boot normally, but most of the time it failed booting around 5-10 times before finally booting up. Failed boot was like this: motherboard gets power, fans start to spin, but USB devices won't start and my monitor stays black. It froze there for about 10 seconds, then rebooted itself until the boot was finally successful. Yesterday night I found out that the latest BIOS should not be flashed on systems with Sandy Bridge CPU, so I decided to flash an earlier version. Again ASRock website says "After updating this BIOS, please flash newer versions only", but I googled a bit (apparently not hard enough) and I came to conclusion that as long as you are going from and UEFI BIOS to UEFI BIOS, flashing older version would work. I couldn't have been more wrong.

 

 

Flashing was successful until my PC rebooted after it. I didn't get BIOS splash screen, just a black screen saying "Error! System cannot get FW version!" and code A3 at the corner. After a while, I figured I that I could boot up my PC if I disconnected my keyboard (Razer Blackwidow 2013) before I booted up my PC. This would give me same black screen with error message, but also a list of USB/SATA devices and and option to either continue or enter BIOS. Plugged my keyboard in, and I could enter both BIOS and Windows.

 

 

So this is my current situation. I have a bricked BIOS, and before I boot up my PC, I have to unplug my keyboard every time :D

 

My motherboard has AMI BIOS. I tried to recover the BIOS following http://www.mullet.se/support/AMI_BIOS_Recovery.pdf this guide's USB method, but it didn't work. I could probably get my hands on floppy disk drive aswell, but would that make any difference?

 

 

Is there anything I could still try, or should I just order a new BIOS chip? The motherboard has PDIP8 chip that's installed in a socket, so replacing it is not going to be a problem.

 

 

 

 

[bradscoolio]

Gonna have to buy a new bios, the only way to truly recover a bricked bios.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Bios-Chip-ASRock-P67-Extreme4-/181059948674?pt=US_Motherboard_Components&hash=item2a28039082

no soldering required 

Here is how you do it: 

[Acizco]

Edit: nvm didn't pay attention to the bottom of the page.

 

 

So I guess I'm ordering a new chip then. Thank you.

[Quaker]

Did you ever reset the CMOS/BIOS in all this? You could simply have an incorrect setting.

[Broseephus]

pull the cmos battery first. If that doesn't help. Then just get a new chip.

[mgsstar]

Edit: nvm didn't pay attention to the bottom of the page.

 

 

So I guess I'm ordering a new chip then. Thank you.

I remember someone having a broken bios on this forum and they contacted Asrock and Asrock gave the person bios chip replacements.

[Acizco]

Did you ever reset the CMOS/BIOS in all this? You could simply have an incorrect setting.

 

Yes I did, no luck.

 

pull the cmos battery first. If that doesn't help. Then just get a new chip.

 

Yup done that, didn't work either. Ordered a new chip :) Also, I doubt that ASRock would have gave me new chip for free since I flashed from new BIOS from earlier, since their website says that you shouldn't flash older version.