i have a Dell Dimension 4700 (check sig for details) that will get a corrupted BIOS at the drop of a hat. sometimes i find it shut off when i know for a fact i left it on, and when i hit the power switch it never gets past the first BIOS screen. sometimes it will hard freeze while i'm using it, and when i do a hard reset (holding the power button) it has a corrupted BIOS. i turned my computer on for the first time in a week (gone on cruise to mexico) and the BIOS was corrupted, there were no poweroutages while i was gone. I replaced the CR2032 battery with a fresh one straight from the package thinking it might be a bad backup battery. but to no avail. this problem has been getting more and more frequent, and more and more difficult each time. at first it would happen maybe once every two weeks, and require a normal CMOS clear. but yesterday i had to clear the BIOS three times and each time took several attempts to do it (clear CMOS, boot, see if works, then repeat) and when i say several i mean literally close to 20 tries each time. here are some pics of the two types of screens it displays when the BIOS is bad. the one that says dell is what i normally shows, but in these pics there are artifacts and glitches in the display. this is close to what my normal BIOS screen looks like. just subtract the artifacts from the left of the progress bar along the bottom and the phoenix copyright from the top. the artifacts mean its not going to boot right, but the copyright thing showed up about the same time these problems did and it can still boot when showing it to be honest i'm not even sure this screen is related to the BIOS, because i have an intel CPU and Phoenix BIOS. is it possible the BIOS got so messed up that this is some status message from the CPU? sometimes there are typos in the text, words truncated, even multiple letters in one spot (they cycle between letters so quickly it's a blur) this is another example of the corrupted BIOS. when there's corrupted variations of the dell screen, or the intel text screen the computer will not boot. the only time the computer will successfully boot is when the dell screen is uncorrupted (although the Phoenix Copyright doesnt seem to negatively affect anything; it is still not supposed to be there)
no dice, this is a pentium 4 system. version A10 is the most up to date but i reflashed it when i was having troubles. it was A10 before the issues started. what really pisses me off is the BIOS chip isnt removeable. i wish i could just ebay a new one and be done with it
Yip if its not software (ie flashing a new copy of bios) and that does not solve it then its physical, i say the mobo is "kaput" around the bios chip by the error messages....a new mobo is needed.
