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Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief

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On Sat, 7/12/2025 8:46 PM, bad sector wrote:

> 
> I never touched the CPU, the next boot failed after I edited the BIOS and among a few other things disabled the CPU-native graphics.
> 
> Then following your advice I managed to reboot into BIOS, ultimately able to launch an OS. I ha it made using 1/2 of my memory!
> 
> J. O. Aho suggested and I prepped a BIOS upgrade usb drive (there are 3 different BIOS sections in the manual, all of them full of mistakes).
> 
> As I pressed the bios flash button the LED never illuminated so after about 6 seconds I let it go.
> 
> Now I cannot get past the yellow (ram) LED no matter what ddr5 I set in no matter what ram slot.
> 

Hmmm.

Restore non-ECC DIMM in the "best working socket" your previous testing revealed.

You are likely going to need to flash the BIOS back to some
previous version, at a guess.

On some systems, switching off the power three times, when the machine
is in trouble, initiates "load setup defaults" so you (in theory) can
get back in control of the machine.

*******

The purpose of a non-bricking BIOS design, is to never erase the bootstrap section.

Then, one of the BIOS flashing options, should always have an interpreter ready to
read the USB stick and FAT file system, find the named file, and flash it in.

I don't know if that BIOS flashing code has been written to work with
only CPU registers (so a non-working memory is not a problem). Some of the BIOs
code must operate that way, in order so the BIOS code can commission the DRAM
subsystem.

On my ten year old machine, the flasher is a chip connected right to the USB port.

On my three year old machine, the CPU and RAM must be working, for a flash operation
to move forward. Which means, even if AGESA isn't optimal, there is some code
present that can do a flash, but a lot more things can still go wrong. It is
definitely not as foolproof as a flasher-chip type solution.

When a "machine has a button", we don't really know how that works. and while you
would hope a flasher-chip, if it existed, would be physically placed near the
USB stack that supports flashing, the board layout could be such the chip is
just about anywhere. But usually the layout done by humans, the chip is closer
to where it is being used, rather than being routed across from the other side
of the board.

We don't know, if the flasher button terminates in a GPIO signal on the SOC portion
of the CPU, or whether it terminates on a flasher-chip. I guess that is part of the
fun. Even when you have a flasher-chip, the board *still* has firmware or software
based flashing options, in addition to the "unbrickable" USB flasher chip.

*******

You may be at the point, you're going to need to take this in somewhere, and
see if a techie can flash it back to something that works. You *used* to be
able to flash a BIOS backwards, but it took some standalone flasher and an
MSDOS boot media, to "free-form flash", meaning a version check was not
done on purpose, and you could move backwards. We stopped using such flashers,
more than ten years ago, which is why I'm kinda wondering what options
are available for going back to an older version.

At a minimum, what is supposed to happen, is a model number string in the
BIOS image is checked, so you can't flash in the BIOS from some other board.
The version is a separate issue. The only interface you may have, is a
single LED, where the "blink frequency" is all that tells you whether
the flash is ongoing, or, the blinking represents a failure on the
users part, to pass all the model and version number requirements. A single
LED has a definite lack of expressive power.

The behavior of the machine I'm typing this on, changed after a year. The
machine seemed to develop an address map problem. Shutting off the iGPU and
using an NVidia video card, was part of the solution. My first hint of
(some sort of) trouble, was the RealTek Ethernet chip would stop sending/receiving
packets after 30 seconds. At first I thought I had a DNS problem, but no, the chip
just stopped after 30 seconds (looked driver-related). I purchased a replacement
Intel NIC (possibly a Startech), and shut off the RealTek in the BIOS. And after
that, I was "back in control" after a fashion, but this is only a superficial fix,
and whatever is wrong in there, still seems to be wrong. And in my case,
flashing up (a couple times to date), made absolutely no difference to the
symptom set. It wasn't like an older BIOS was "bugged" and a newer one made
a difference.

But at this point, until things stabilize in your computer room, you'll be
working with the non-ECC DRAM in its "best" socket. While you try to
re-gain a stable BIOS behavior.

   Paul

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Thread

Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-12 00:45 -0400
  Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-12 03:04 -0400
    Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-12 11:02 -0400
      Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> - 2025-07-12 17:24 +0200
      Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-12 19:14 -0400
        Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-12 20:46 -0400
          Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-13 01:58 -0400
            Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> - 2025-07-13 11:35 +0200
              Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-13 19:20 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-13 22:20 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-14 01:36 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-15 19:26 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-16 04:44 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-16 09:34 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-07-16 11:11 -0400
                Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-16 17:19 -0400
                new board ..Re: Asus x870e: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-31 22:48 -0400
                Re: new board ..Re: Asus x870e: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-01 05:16 -0400
                Re: new board ..Re: Asus x870e: more grief Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> - 2025-08-02 14:59 +0300
                Re: new board ..Re: Asus x870e: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-08-03 06:29 -0400
  Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> - 2025-07-12 10:23 +0200
    Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-07-12 08:53 -0400
      Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> - 2025-07-12 17:11 +0200
  Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-08-01 14:02 +0200
    Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-08-01 09:41 -0400
      Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-08-01 19:49 +0200
    Re: Asus x870e Proart Creator motherboard: more grief bad sector <forgetski@_INVALID.net> - 2025-08-03 06:29 -0400

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