I did a BIOS upgrade this morning for my ASUS P5N32-SLI motherboard, normally I don’t do them unless they are absolutely necessary, this one supposedly fixes something with the network cards that should make them work properly in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) [I think if what I read on the forums is correct]. I downloaded the update file (BIOS version 1404) from ASUS.com stuck it on a memory stick, booted the machine lauched the EZ Flash bios update tool (built into the bios) and went to make a cup of tea.

I came back to a black screen, fans and LED’s running but nothing else. Switched off and on… same thing, hit the reset button, same thing. At this point I start hyperventilation as I realise that this is an extremely expensive motherboard and that life is seriously going to suck if I have to replace this thing, that I probably end up single because the money that I was going to spend on my girlfriends birthday present would have to pay for the replacement board.

To cut along story short, I fiddled for a while, even tried to use the “Asus CrashFree” feature but nothing worked. Did a lot of searching and then came across this post on the Asus Forums. In it some guy suggest pulling the cmos battery out waiting a bit and putting it in, I had already tried the “reset cmos jumper”. Low and behold it fixed it 🙂

After all this I took a look at todays date… Friday 13th.

So here the important details for Google to index and hopefully help someone else out:

Asus P5N32-SLI Motherboard
Problem: Flashed BIOS to 1404 version, computer wouldn’t boot no POST nothing.
Solution: Switch off, take out cmos battery wait a minute, put back in switch on, reconfigure BIOS.