Can you kill your bios like this?

[puzzel]

i hope not...
Hi and thx for reading.
After having bought a new system today, i was unable to get the gigabyte 8ik1100 motherboard to recognize a maxtor s-ata harddrive. I tried all possible settings, nothing worked.
Either the drive was not recognized, while having the s-ata settings on auto mode in the bios, resulting in maxblast software not finding any disc to partion or the drive was recognized while manually setting the s-ata drive to pri/sec IDE-master, which resulted in maxblast freezing while searching for the drives subsystem.
I had previously partitioned and formated the drive using a win98 start-disc and fdisk.

Talking to a friend on the phone, he suggested to try using the new winXP as a start-disc, which he thought might help in any way.

So I changed to boot sequence for drives in the bios from floppy>HDD>CD-Rom to CD-Rom>floppy>HDD. I rebooted, inserted the winXP disc and after passing through the regular bios boot sequence the CD-Rom drive read a few second, then the monitor blacked out. The reset and power switches did not respond anymore.
I manually rebooted the system after which nothing happend. No bios, no start-up beep, nothing gets recognized, black screen. I have removed and replaced all components with no effect. I tried to reset the cmos by taking out the battery, since there seems to be no cmos-reset-jumper, which had no effect either, the bios does not load, it all seems very dead besides the fans that are working.

I am totally puzzled, as to how changing the boot sequence of the drives can have such an effect on the bios. The few seconds of winXP could not have ruined anything?
I really dont know what i can do, besides buying a new motherboard which i really cant afford anymore now =(((

Sorry for this long text, but i hope someone can give me a hint or a tip what i should do, or how to reset the bios defaults in any way.

Thanks alot.. P

 

[Crazy]

I dont think its that easy to kill your bios.
Surely there must be a way to reset you CMOS? Have you read your manual?

I would say, try another hard drive. The bios detects your cd-rom so maybe its the hard drive.

Also are you sure the jumper settings are correct?

Greets Crazy,

 

[Hitman`]

the CMOS chip is hard to kill normally, unless you are flashing it or pulling it in and out of the socket. Flashing it too often will hurt the chip as a whole, so dont flash it unless absolutely necessary. (such as new device support) if you clear the BIOS, make sure the power cord is disconnected from the computer and the jumper is set to discharge for at least 30 seconds, maybe more depending on the manufacturer. failuire to remove the power cord will still put current through to the system, which will corrupt the settings in the BIOS and not clearing them, because ATX power supplies usually run in a suspend mode when the computer is off, leaving the power circuitry in the motherboard on while the PSU is plugged in, so make sure you remove ALL power before clearing the BIOS or you could have problems booting it.

 

[Charles Hammond]

Drivers for SATA are in an obscure folder on the XP Disk.