BIOS glitch

[Alibaby]

PhenomIIx6 1100t
Ga-990fxa-ud5 motherboard
Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz
Gigabyte gtx-580 graphics card
WD1002FEAX 1TB hdd
LG DVD/RW
Win7 64 bit OS
Bliss 1000W Gaming PSU

The wife started the machine this morning and got a message that the Main BIOS had a problem and was getting info from the secondary BIOS.

It is booting up fine now but I don't know if the board is buggered or if it resolved its own glitch.

Do I leave it or do I return it to the place of purchase and wait for a couple of months for them to tell me it is user error?

Already received the F5b BIOS Beta from you.

Thanks for any suggestions.

P.S. I didn't see the problem , just a garbled response from her about what happened.

[autotech]

That is the back up bios kicking in and shouldnt be a problem. Could be due to overclock gone wrong or just a corrupted bios. Either way gigabyte planned well for that problem and installed a back up bios on that board and many others.

My advice is keep an eye on it and if it doesnt happen again with no overclock then dont worry, If you have an overclock do it one step at a time and run a day or two each step so you can narrow it down. It no way infers that the board is bad at this point.

[Alibaby]

Thanks for the heads up.

Can't be an overclock gone bad though because the system is not overclocked in any fashion. Probably just the BIOS beta wasn't any good, will wait for update at a later date.

[autotech]

i am sure it isnt bad and gigabyte will straighten it up just take a bit.

[Dark Mantis]

I agree. It certainly isn't worth RMAing it for that and it is much more likely that a glitch in the BIOS caused it or any number of other causes. Nothing to worry about at the moment though.

[Alibaby]

Thanks for the input.

 The wife is scared to death of the computer now, good for me, but I told her it's fine.

Just reminded her that if she sees something strange , DO NOT PANIC.

We both feel better knowing the beast has the capability to do what is right for itself.

Love the dual BIOS feature, saves me a lot of money and running around.

 I will keep you informed of her further adventures in Computerland

[autotech]

I know the feeling your wife has and it is fully understood. Years ago i had a bios go bad on an asus board took 3 weeks and 20.00 to get a new bios then it was the first level out for the board and was a read only rom so it wasnt possiale to flash it to a newer bios. So 2 weeks later on the phone with some head honcho from asus they refunded my money and sent me the correct chip already flashed to the newest bios. Board was 6 months old at that point.

Never bought another asus but tried a few dfi's then saw that gigabyte used a dual bios feature and never bought another brand since. No matter what you always have the good read only bios and have only had a small ram channell problem on 1 gigabyte and they rmaed it and was back in a week working perfect.

I am not employed by gigabyte and dont really like tooting anyones horn on how good a product they make so please just take it for what it is worth one consumer to another, gigabyte hasn't let me down yet.

[Alibaby]

II know what you mean about other manufacturers. Had a problem with an ASUS board, took them 8 months to get me a replacement that crapped out a week later.

Since then I only use Gigabyte, this was the first time it did something strange but seems to be working fine now.

Toot away at the virtues of the boards , they are worth every penny and so is the support from the Manufacturer and the Forum.

[teknology9]

Here here, I am sold on Gigabyte due to the dual BIOS. When AMD Bulldozer is launched I will invest in a 990FX MB.


Teknology9

[Benz]

It happened to me this morning when I woke my computer from sleep it immediately flashed to the default BIOS.

[Dark Mantis]

II know what you mean about other manufacturers. Had a problem with an ASUS board, took them 8 months to get me a replacement that crapped out a week later.

Since then I only use Gigabyte, this was the first time it did something strange but seems to be working fine now.

Toot away at the virtues of the boards , they are worth every penny and so is the support from the Manufacturer and the Forum.

I used to do the same on the Asus Forum and I lost count of the number of complaints about how long it took to get anything done in the way of RMA/repairs/replacements. They are absolutely terrible and take an age to do anything.

The Dual BIOS is a lifesaver at times and I have managed to help other people to get it to kick in even when it seemed that the board was dead and nothing would work.

[Plasma]

Hi there,

I'm experiencing the same issue with my 890gpa-ud3h: from now and then the bios fails to initialize and immediately starts copying from the backup.
Besides the fact that it's pretty annoying loosing the current version of the bios including all the settings, I'm surprised how often this happens (3-4 time in one year, now) - never had such an issue before with other mobos from other brands.

In order not to lose all the settings, I'm now searching for a way that the bios:
1st: doesn't automatically copy the backup bios to the "normal" bios, but asks me what to do (as my feeling is that the bios just failed to initialize, but is actually not corrupt)

2nd: there seem to be possibilities to define an alternative backup BIOS: on one hand the bios offers to "Backup BIOS image to HDD" (in the advanced settings) and the bios backing up screen (when the mobo failed to initialize properly) shows also that it didn't load the backup from the HDD but from the backup bios. I'm not sure whether these two things are the same, but does anybody know what these settings are for and how they work? The manual didn't help really...

It would be great if someone could help me, please.

Thanks,
Plasma

[Dark Mantis]

Hi Plasma and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

I think your first point is probably about right as sometimes the Backup BIOS kicks in even when there is no apparent problem and then tells you it is due to overclocking usually! There is nothing that you can do about this though it is the BIOS writers who need to address this issue.

What I would suggest though is to install whatever BIOS version that you are happy with (maybe the latest)  and then synchronise the two BIOS versions (Main and Backup) so that even if the worst happens it is stil the same versioon as you are used to.

Try asking GGTS for help with this problem and maybe if enough people complain they will finally do something about it.

Just enter your email address and click on the language of choice.
GGTS   http://ggts.gigabyte.com/

Please expect several days for a reply.

[Plasma]

Hello Dark Mantis,

Thank you for the reply and for the suggestion to contact GGTS - I will do that.

With regards to synchronizing the two BIOS it would already help me a lot - I must have overseen this option somewhere - can you tell me how to do that, please?
I'm very happy with the latest stable bios (FF) so I'd choose that one.

Thanks,
Plasma

[Dark Mantis]

In that case just follow these instructions:

To check, go into the BIOS and on the MAIN page press F9 for system info.   You should see both BIOS versions listed, if they do not match please update the backup BIOS to match the current.

To do that, reboot and where you would normally press DEL to enter the BIOS, instead press Alt + F12, this will flash the Backup BIOS with the MAIN BIOS contents.   Do not worry when you see a recovery comment, that is normal and means it is flashing the backup BIOS.