Warning! Shutting down your pc may be hazardous to your evening.

On Sunday night, just before I was about to work on my website, there were a few nice thunderstorms in the area. I decided it was a good idea to shut down and unplug my computer. Ugh, who would have thought that it could ruin your evening?

When the thunderstorms were over, I decided to get back to work... plugged the pc back in, and hit the power button. The BIOS screen then informs me that the CMOS has a bad checksum, and that it loaded the defaults... ok, so I hit delete and reset all the values to the correct ones. I hit save and exit, and it rebooted, er tried to.

All the normal beeps, just no video signal. Ugh, I've seen this happen before with my roomie's computer. He had to replace the motherboard. I turned off and rebooted the machine about 20 times, one of those times I actually got a video signal. It said no BIOS image on the disk, please insert correct disk (or something similar). I unhooked the computer from my setup and put a new power supply and a few cards in my old Athlon 900.

Booted that thing up and grabbed the latest updates from Microsoft (so I don't get any nice worms goin around today). I then proceeded to the manufacturer's web site (www.giga-byte.com) and went through all their tech support, submitted a request, and waited. I decided to download the latest BIOS while I'm there, in case I needed it later.

Being the impatient one I am, I went back to the malfuntioning pc. I cycled the power, (in case any power is left in the power supply) and removed the CMOS battery.
Then I went to back my other pc, and installed a floppy drive. Now I have to make a bootable floppy disk... wooohooo, my favorite thing to do in Windows XP. Since someone decided to remove the "copy system files" option from the format utility, I went through the completly idiotic task of trying to make a bootable floppy. I miss Windows 98 sometimes.

I copied the BIOS flash files and utils to the bootable floppy, and turned on the broken pc without the CMOS battery. It actually booted to the BIOS without the battery. I am slightly surprised at this point, as I didn't even think I was going to get a video signal, like the 19 or so times before. Removing the battery seemed to do the trick.

Now any changes that I make to the CMOS will not be saved. I shut it down, and moved the floppy drive from the working pc, to the broken one, and booted the broken one up. It was able to boot to the BIOS again!

I went into the BIOS flash utility, and hovered over the "Flash BIOS" button for about 20 seconds before I decided not to do it, just in case I may have the wrong BIOS file. I reset the computer and it failed to boot again, black screen of death (no video signal). @#&^*!

I powered it down, holding the power button in for 5 seconds, cycled the power supply, and turned it on again. *sigh* booted into the BIOS screen one more time. This is where I said screw it, I'm gonna flash it with this file.
I Flashed it with the BIOS revision F9, when I was operating on version F3. It's been 6 updates! Although, I didn't see anything in the docs that said it would fix the problems I was having, but what can it hurt right? I can't use this machine anyway. BIOS Flash went well, and I had the option to reset or power down from the flash utility.

I powered it down and re-installed the CMOS battery, removed the floppy drive, (who needs one of those anyway? :) set up CMOS, and booted into Windows for the first time since I thought I was going to have to replace the motherboard.

What a pain in the ass.