Have I Bricked my Motherboard? (GIGABYTE H61M DS2 REV 2.2)

[AlbanHampton]

Okay, so this may be a long post, so bare with me.

So it started off with me upgraded to windows 10 many months ago, after the upgrade, my restart time shot up to roughly 5 minutes, the problem was that it would hang on the Gigabyte Motherboard screen for like 4 minutes, during this time I was unable to get into any of the settings, like the bios, boot menu, q flash etc.

So today I needed to restart my pc (I had been putting it to sleep for the last few months so that I don't have to wait for the restart), but because it takes so long, I was banned on CS for leaving a match, which is fair play, so I went about to fix the issue.

Firstly I took out the CMOS battery, waited 5 minutes, and replaced it with a new one, but for some reason the pc would do it usual "hang on the motherboard screen for 4 minutes" but then it would go to black, and nothing, windows 10 does boot up, it's just a black screen, the monitor is on, signal hasn't been lost, the screen is just black. So, I assumed it must be the new battery, so I replace it with the old one, same thing.

I then found out about flashing the motherboard, so I downloaded the latest GIGABYTE H61M DS2 REV 2.2 bios driver, put extracted it to a freshly formatted Fat32 USB, and then attempted to flash my motherboard. Problem is, I cannot the window to pop up, so the motherboard screen comes up for 4 minutes, I'm there costantly pressing END so that the q flash comes up, but it doesn't, it just goes back to black screen, same with bios, boot setup. I'm thinking it is the keyboard, so I try another 3 USB keyboards, none of them work, I then try a super old PS2 connector keyboard, still doesn't work.

The final thing I tried was to clear CMOS manually with a flathead (mother didn't come with a jumper) so I turned off the PC, removed the power cord, then placed the flathead inbetween to 2 pins making sure it touched both, for roughly 5 seconds, this did nothing, PC turns on, hangs at bios screen, goes to black.

So this has got me thinking, have I bricked my motherboard? I mean since the update to windows 10 I have never been able to enter bios, so maybe it has something to do with that.

Can anyone please shed a light on my situation, or am I just going to have to buy a new motherboard?

Thanks in advance.


PS: Other Specs Are;


GIGABYTE H61M DS2 REV 2.2
i5 3570k
GTX 970
8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
500GB Seagate HDD



EDIT: I AM CURRENTLY LEAVING THE MOTHERBOARD BATTERY OUT OVER NIGHT TO SEE IF IT HELPS.

 

[littleleo]

I had a similar issue with a machine and it turned out to be a bad BIOS you may need to RMA the motherboard.

 

[AlbanHampton]

I had a similar issue with a machine and it turned out to be a bad BIOS you may need to RMA the motherboard.

Well I've had this Motherboard for nearly 4 years now, so RMA is out of the question, but if it's fucked, then I'll just buy a new one, just thought it was a little bit strange that this would happen after a simple battery switch

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Have you tried using the integrated graphics? Both with and without the 970 installed?

 

[littleleo]

I had a similar issue with a machine and it turned out to be a bad BIOS you may need to RMA the motherboard.

Well I've had this Motherboard for nearly 4 years now, so RMA is out of the question, but if it's fucked, then I'll just buy a new one, just thought it was a little bit strange that this would happen after a simple battery switch

Did you ground yourself before you touched your motherboard or were you wearing a ground strap. If you had any static discharge when you were touching your motherboard you could have fried a chip very easily. Or maybe it the BIOS file you used was corrupted you might try DL the version just before it and try flashing again.

 

[Knowmansoul]

Your board has Dual Bios protection. Have you used the procedure to force the board to restore the bios from the on board backup? One thing to keep in mind when upgrading a BIOS, is always make certain the REV # on the board matches the new BIOS you download. That particular model of mobo has had eight revisions. If you get the wrong revision, it can lock up the system. The procedure for forcing the gigabyte board into restore mode. Look up Leandro Lopes youtube channel "Recover BIOS With Dual BIOS System - GIGABYTE motherboards". If corrupt bios is your issue, his steps may get your board back.

 

[littleleo]

That is a great point about the revision number, I had a system I added a GTX 750 Ti to, and after that it started freezing at the at the motherboard splash screen. I attempted to make it use the back up BIOS to correct the main BIOS but it was still not working. I finally took it in to Gigabyte and RMA'd it and they sent me a replacement motherboard which has work fine since. If this is a BIOS issue and you can't get the BIOS restore to work. And flashing another version doesn't work you may need to replace the board.