Bios Menu never loads after battery change

hello everyone, thought i'd best make a new thread for this

A few days ago, i changed a dead CMOS battery in my motherboard, as various settings (like the system clock) were not being saved, and resetting every session.

The new battery did indeed fix that, but it caused another problem. The bios menu is completely inacessible. Like most pc's there the usual "press Del to enter setup" on the startup screen, and before changing the battery that menu worked fine. Now when i press del, the screen goes black to load, and stays that way permanantly. the menu never appears. this is problematic as i need to use it to fix a different problem (which isn't relevant to this one)


The Pc in question:
-------------------
it's a Shuttle XPC. smaller pcs that use a custom form factor. It's this model: http://uk.shuttle.com/products/produ...?productId=470

about this machine specifically:
1.5 ghz athlon cpu
S3 graphics prosavage DDR (onboard video)
480 MB DDR1 ram
windows xp professional (SP3)


things i've tried so far:
-someone mentioned a keyboard shortcut to access the menu (ctrl+alt+esc). this doesn't seem to work.

-on recommendation of a friend, clearing the cmos with the little jumper peg. It straddles two of three pins. i moved it over a pin, left it for 10 secs, and put it back. On boot this triggered a message "CMOS checksum error: defaults loaded" which indicated it did something at least, but the menu is still not accessible.


there is also another, identical peg, which is only covering a little set of two pins. i have no idea what that's for but i vaguely remember messing around with it out of curiosity. i'm pretty sure i put it back the way i found it though. could it be relevant?

Any advice to help me access the bios would be greatly appreciated

 

Hello,
According to the manual here are the settings for those jumpers.

Clear CMOS Setting (JP1)

Pin 1-2 (Default)
Pin 2-3 (Clear CMOS)

FSB Setting (JP2)

FX41 provides jumper JP2 to configure front side bus at 100/133MHz
Pin 1-2 (100MHz)
No Jumper (133MHz)

BIOS Written Protection (JP4)

JP4 is used to protect BIOS from abnormal writing. You may choose to place
jumper cap on pins 1-2 for BIOS written protection; however, please place
jumper cap on pins 2-3 if you need to reflash BIOS.

Not sure why you cannot get into BIOS though. Are you using a USB keyboard? If so try using a PS-2 keyboard. USB legacy support may not be enabled. Also, try unpluging the keyboard. You may get a BIOS error, then plug the keyboard back in and enter bios.

 

The error could be being caused by a faulty device which is halting the bios.

While your diagnosing the problem remove everything apart from a keyboard and try both USB and PS2 'As Tgell said' ,all disk drives,add in cards EVERYTHING,use one stick of memory one you know works if possible or try one stick then remove and try to enter the bios with another.

You also may want to try another battery,it could be dead straight out of the box,these kind of faults on new parts are rare but when they happen they can have you pulling your hair out tryna find the fault,also double check you've installed the right battery.

I know its unrelated but could you post details of the other problem,multiple unrelated problems at the same time are EXTREMELY rare.

Does the computer work fine otherwise? Can you load windows O.K? If so is your clock now keeping time?

 

haii everyone, thanks for the replies. I'm not certain what to do with the jumper information, but it's interesting to know that there's 3 jumpers. By the looks of that info, two of them have three pins, so maybe I didn't actually clear the cmos and was workign with the wrong jumper. I've got a magnifying glass now and im going to take a closer look.

will test without devices too, that might work. I'm carrying around a ps2 keyboard for reasons unrelated to this particular machine (see if you can find my other post ) so i'll try that in the minipc and see if i get anywhere.

i believe the clock was keeping time fine after i installed the new battery, i might not be confident to testify that in court though. is the battery actually required to get into the bios menu ? the computer seems to start fine without any battery installed. well, as fine as it can,

The other problem is a dead windows install. I was trying to update the drivers for the onboard video, downloaded from the shuttle site. The computer now bluescreens while attempting to load windows and i can't even get the option to go into safemode. im trying to use the bios menu to set the CD drive to boot first, so i can boot a recovery disk and rollback the driver.

I'm 100% certain that the problems were not simultaneous. the bios menu broke when the battery was changed. I didn't pay too much attention to it at the time and thought it would fix itself or somesuch. the driver update i did a few days later, it's only after that failed that the broken bios menu became a problem

 

Here is the manual of your computer for your reference showing all of the jumper settings.

 

ok, all testing complete, no change.

i've tried two other batteries, clearing the cmos after each change. i've tried running the bare minimum hardware, which is justwithout the hard drive and cd drive as everything else is necessary. it's a pretty basic system. i found all three pegs, and did plenty of messing about with them. i definitely had cleared the cmos correctly so that's not it.

back to the drawing board. anymore ideas ?

 

Have you tried to boot with a USB key?

 

I would also make you do a complete discharge of the cmos,disconnect from the AC,remove the cmos battery then power on button to completely drain it,leave it in this state for a while,reinsert cmos battery and try to power up.

 

same problem as booting from a cd. i can't get into the bios menu to change the boot order. The workaround is to unplug the hard drive which makes it go down and boot the next device in the order, but that means no HD is registered, even when hotplugged back in, so i can't boot anything to fix the windows install.

 

With the case cover off, do you notice and bulging or leaking capacitors?

Does the computer come with a floppy drive?

 

ok i've tried this. no effect

i went and googled pictures of bulging or leaking capacitors so i knew what to look for. did a thorough inspection of the machine, all of them are fine.

there is no floppy drive.

Any other suggestions? why hasn't anyone mentioned flashing the bios yet, i'm not too knowledgeable about that, would it help maybe ?

 

Unfortunately, you need to boot into dos in order to flash the BIOS. And you have to have a bootable floppy or CD in order to do that. I looked at the bios file for your computer but the zipped file only contained the flash utility. The firmware file was not in the zipped file so I do not know what is going on there. There is a bin file that is used with the utility to flash the BIOS.

Does the computer still post?

 

i can boot from a cd. I think i mentioned earlier, by unplugging the hard drive it boots from the next thing on the list. that jsut wasn't any use for fixing the windows install as the pc won't recognise hotplugged drives.

what i know of bios flashing, (which is very little) is that it's extremely dangerous and shouldn't be attempted unless i have someone who knows what they're doing telling me what to do >.> I'd be scared to touch it if it seemed like pieces were missing.

The computer does indeed still post. as far as i can tell it works perfectly aside from the nonfunctional bios menu. As of today the priority of this issue has thankfully dropped significantly; i managed to work around the broken bios by plugging the HD into another computer (with a working bios) and reinstalling windows through that, then moving the drive back. messy perhaps, but it worked. I would still like to fix the bios menu if possible though!

 

Glad you got it sorted! Indeed, flashing a BIOS can brick your computer if something should go wrong and now that you have everything back I would leave it alone. You might want to give Shuttle support an email explaining the BIOS problem. Maybe they have seen this before.

 

The reason I wouldn't flash the bios ATM is because there's something seriously wrong with it,the menu being broken isn't something a flash would fix,flash's only fix small things such as recognising memory or devices.

If there is something wrong with the bios chip/system and new flash may not take,it would delete the old one and be unable to reinstall the new file.

Also in my experience bios's don't corrupt,if they ever become corrupt the computer as Tgell said becomes a brick,absolutely useless,could this be the one time a bios corrupts without completely killing the computer? I don't know.

The way to to check if a bios flash would help is to read the bios update readme's on your manufacturers website,the link you've provided is dead or I would look for it,if the problem your experiencing 'a black screen halting bios menu' then an update should fix it,if this problem isn't listed in the bios file fixes or in Google then I would assume the motherboard has a hardware fault which cannot be fixed with software.

When updating something such as the bios you CANNOT use the general model of your computer either,you must use the exact product code,service number of the motherboard or chipset,you must also check the file name of the previous bios to make sure it matches the bios update history,this is usually visible on the post screen or by navigating through the bios menu.

Its one of those cases where you could end up making things much worse and wish you could go back a day because you didn't realise how lucky you were before.

As a general course of troubleshooting I would also try a different video card and try switching between PS2 and USB keyboard and mouse.

 

Can you still access Windows? The reason I ask is i came across a topic about bad bios updates from Biostar that would cause one of the function buttons to act as a lockout from the bios. Maybe try flashing it back to an older bios version or try to update? Not to sure the steps you have taken.

 

@Rikky,
Here is the link for his computer.

http://uk.shuttle.com/products/productsDownload?productId=470

What I cannot understand is that the zip file for the BIOS contains the flash utility but no firmware file.

Edit: found a better support page. This site has the BIOS firmware. He could do it within windows. I have successfully updated a BIOS in Windows but things could always go wrong. Well, I though it did. All of those links are dead.

http://www.shuttle.eu/_archive/older/en/sk41g.htm#sk41g

 

The bios binary files are under 'Bios' and the AWD utility is under 'Utilities' in that link.

http://uk.shuttle.com/products/productsDownload?productId=470

None of the bios fixes address a broken bios menu,at this point fixing the bios menu would be in the 'only if its needed to enable the computer to function' category otherwise I wouldn't flash it,its up to you though...