BIOS recovery on Compaq 0784h motherboard.

I have a Compaq 0784h motherboard which needs a BIOS recovery due to an unfortunate occurrence during a BIOS update, which has resulted in a black screen and what appears to be an unresponsive floppy drive. I know some motherboards have a BIOS recovery jumper, but as far as I can see this one does not have one, so I am at a loss as to how to go about recovering this thing, if that is even possible. I am not at all fluent in computer language, but if I have at least a means of getting into the ROM chip I will give it a whirl, as I would like to run the BOINC manager on this machine. Does anybody know the procedure, if there is one, regarding BIOS recovery for this motherboard?

 

Greetings, cibolabwana, and welcome to MajorGeeks...

Having a hard time finding any information about that particular board.

In your Tom's Hardware thread you mention the following:

Have you tried anything with this jumper? And, have you tried pulling the CMOS battery for a while, then reinstalling the battery? I know that may not necessarily solve the problem, but I'm looking for any change in symptoms.

 

How old is your PC?

What is your Compaq model number?

Is the BIOS PROM chip removable?

 

Salutations! The motherboard is from a Compaq 6024US Presario I got from a guy at work a few weeks ago, so I do not know much of it's history, but from what I can tell it must be around 7 -10 years old. The processor is a Celeron 2.6 GHZ single core with 512 MB RAM, and no, the ROM chip is not removable. The jumper near the chip is small, requiring a tweezers to remove it, not the size of the password jumper, which is easily removed with fingers. Nevertheless, I did try removing it and powering up the unit, to no avail. I also tried removing the battery. Nothing either. There is also what I presume to be a CMOS reset button, which also has changed nothing. From what I can tell, when I power up the machine none of the drives attempt to read anything. The floppy does nothing at all; the CD-Rom gives the same response either plugged into the motherboard or not, which is a few spins then nothing; and nothing elsewhere, either. The monitor gives a "no signal" status. Finally, there is also an unidentified bank of five 2-pin jumpers near the card slots, the exception being the 4th jumper, which has only one pin. All other jumper banks are identified as something or other. I know I have seen something somewhere (Intel or HP site perhaps) showing photographs of a multi-jumper bank on some other motherboard with at least one of the jumpers associated with BIOS, with no further elaboration. Anything there perhaps? This whole thing started with a "1801-Microcode Patch Error. Missing or invalid processor microcode patch. Update BIOS to support new processor stepping" code at boot. I suspect the processor is not original, as somewhere in my wanderings through this unit when it was still running I saw a reference to a Pentium 4 chip, but I don't remember where I saw that. Thanks for any help.

 

Further investigation of the "jumper" reveals it not to be a jumper at all, but one of the small plastic pieces such as found in headers, so I presume it might be to plug something in for some purpose, but for what I have no clue. I tried removing the battery, and also tried depressing the CMOS button, but nothing has changed. I know some boards have a boot block code that allows a recovery without a jumper, but I do not know if this is one of them or what the procedure to do that is. In either case, all the drives are completely unresponsive, which leads me to conclude it's a lost cause anyway, as I know that type of recovery involves copying files to BIOS. Unfortunately, if this board had pupils, they would be dilated. Still, I hate to chuck it as long as I don't know for sure if it's hopeless.

 

This looks to be your motherboard and it has the CMOS button and no associated jumper.
Just to be sure you should have had the PC unplugged when hitting the button for 5 seconds or so. Same with battery, unplugged from electric when removing the battery.

If this was a failed update and you have no access to the floppy drive I don't see any way forward. Like you said the board has to be able to read the floppy to rewrite the CMOS code.

 

The diagram is basically that of the board, with a small discrepancy in the layout of the components in the corner with the CMOS button. Additionally, the pins/jumper/header (P14) I was referring to is not shown or mentioned in the literature. I have had the board out of the computer and next to me on the couch off and on now for several days, with the battery out overnight on several occasions, each time hitting the CMOS button enough to know it should have been electrically dead for sure, so I have to assume "fried" is a word I should seriously consider thinking about using hereafter. Forward is somewhat relative, sach2. I've been looking at building something new, anyway. Thanks for the help.

 

Just a thought, but what happens in the case of a BIOS not supporting a processor? Is there some function, or is the machine completely dead, as mine?

 

What was the unfortunate occurrence during the BIOS update?

You have to understand that there is a ROM chip that holds only 512kb data on it. During a BIOS update it is erased then new code is written. If something goes wrong during this process then the computer no longer has the very basic instructions that tell it how to identify the various devices hooked up to it to allow booting an operating system or even the simplest instructions that just tell it to begin the process of looking around for basic necessities like a keyboard or monitor.

Older boards did not have a backup chip which could allow BIOS recovery. Many still don't have a recovery process.

If this board worked previous to a BIOS update with the same processor then I don't think it is an incompatibility issue. I think you had a bad BIOS flash and any information about what happened will help determine that. Really not worth a lot of effort to save an old board like that. They have a lifespan and with cheap capacitors it is probably fairly far gone even if it is/was recoverable.

 

The system had some issues to start with, specifically, an 1801 microcode patch error message at boot, requiring keyboard input to continue into windows, which functioned only minimally, as it was plagued by a ridiculous amount of hang ups requiring a restart, which only started the whole process all over again. Actually, I am 100% certain it was a bad flash, though I can only assume it was a hang up during the process, perhaps after erasing the BIOS but before or during the rewrite. I agree, the age and some of the other factors concerning this unit limit it's worth in expenditure in both time and money. My question regarding BIOS supporting a processor concerns my interest in installing a newer processor in another computer. I understand it is quite likely the BIOS would need an update, so the question is whether I can install the processor and have it run enough to find, download and install the new BIOS, or will it be completely dysfunctional until I do install the BIOS, which I would then have to do prior to changing the processor? At this point, I am still trying to learn as much about this stuff as I can digest (and afford), but I do not want to turn the thing into a brick in the process. Ultimately, I want to build a decent unit, so what I have here now are guinea pigs.