Question No display after enabling Secure Boot (Gigabyte Motherboard GA-H110M-S2 Rev 1.0) ?

[shaikyahiya]

Hi guys,

After Microsoft released the requirements for Windows 11, I tried enabling Intel PTT and Secure Boot in my Motherboard BIOS and since then I am unable to see any display. The CPU fan runs for a few seconds and stops then starts again. This happens in a cycle. I don't see any display whatsoever.

I had received a warning asking me to disable CSM, which I sadly ignored. Here is a screenshot of it:

https://imgur.com/byPRxfr

I have already tried the following:

1. Removing and putting back the Motherboard battery (to clear CMOS and reset BIOS) -> DIDN'T WORK.
2. Removing the Graphics Card and connecting a VGA cable to the motherboard's display port -> DIDN'T WORK.

Many people on other forums have also faced this issue, specifically on Gigabyte motherboards. I am hoping there's a fix out there. Can you guys please help us out?


PC Specifications:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2 Rev1.0 LGA1151
• Processor: Intel i3-6098p 3.6Ghz 6th Generation Processor
• Graphics Card: Zotac Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GDDR5
• RAM: 24 GB DDR4 (8 +16)
• Cabinet: Cooler Master Elite 310
• Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit

Thanks in advance.

 

[Ma.Rio]

I have the exact same problem with the almost exact same motherboard (mine is h110m-ds2). I've seen at least 2 more people here having the same problem, as well as one guy on Reddit. All of us using Gigabyte's motherboards. This has probably been a sleeper problem that has just recently been uncovered thanks to Win11 making people mess with secure boot.
That one guy from reddit took his pc to a technician amd said he'll tell me the outcome in the next 24h if he remembers. I'll probably post it here if I remember.
If you figure something out please post here as well.
Can't believe a single setting can brick the whole motherboard. And here I thought they were a good brand.

 

[verigoodtomyou]

I have the exact same problem with the almost exact same motherboard (mine is h110m-ds2). I've seen at least 2 more people here having the same problem, as well as one guy on Reddit. All of us using Gigabyte's motherboards. This has probably been a sleeper problem that has just recently been uncovered thanks to Win11 making people mess with secure boot.
That one guy from reddit took his pc to a technician amd said he'll tell me the outcome in the next 24h if he remembers. I'll probably post it here if I remember.
If you figure something out please post here as well.
Can't believe a single setting can brick the whole motherboard. And here I thought they were a good brand.

i will share my own experience. completely unrelated to w11

this happened to me 5-6 months ago, had a ryzen cpu and a gigabyte b450 mobo

one day, for no apparent reason at all, i wanted to enable secure boot. dunno where and what i exactly pushed, but mobo gone bricked. i tried resetting bios, tried removing cmos battery for a complete day, tried everything i could. removed all parts, removed cpu and put it back again,... everything u can imagine. but it was bricked. gone.

i didn't even bother sending it to RMA bcoz i thought i messed up (all i did was enabling secure boot and selecting something about platform keys. i took the blame on myself and kept the board without sending it to rma. because i dont even know what i exactly did, but i don't also know if it was normal for bios to be bricked like that)

in the end i bought a new msi mobo and everything seems to be smooth sailing.

gigabyte needs to answer for this!!! why mobos get bricked by a simple setting!! this is outrageous. we have to come together and voice our concern. there seems to be a huge problem with these gigabyte bioses

 

[shaikyahiya]

I have the exact same problem with the almost exact same motherboard (mine is h110m-ds2). I've seen at least 2 more people here having the same problem, as well as one guy on Reddit. All of us using Gigabyte's motherboards. This has probably been a sleeper problem that has just recently been uncovered thanks to Win11 making people mess with secure boot.
That one guy from reddit took his pc to a technician amd said he'll tell me the outcome in the next 24h if he remembers. I'll probably post it here if I remember.
If you figure something out please post here as well.
Can't believe a single setting can brick the whole motherboard. And here I thought they were a good brand.

Bro, can you paste the link to the Reddit thread? I'll keep a tab on it.
PS: Never buying Gigabyte ever again.

 

[shaikyahiya]

i will share my own experience. completely unrelated to w11

this happened to me 5-6 months ago, had a ryzen cpu and a gigabyte b450 mobo

one day, for no apparent reason at all, i wanted to enable secure boot. dunno where and what i exactly pushed, but mobo gone bricked. i tried resetting bios, tried removing cmos battery for a complete day, tried everything i could. removed all parts, removed cpu and put it back again,... everything u can imagine. but it was bricked. gone.

i didn't even bother sending it to RMA bcoz i thought i messed up (all i did was enabling secure boot and selecting something about platform keys. i took the blame on myself and kept the board without sending it to rma. because i dont even know what i exactly did, but i don't also know if it was normal for bios to be bricked like that)

in the end i bought a new msi mobo and everything seems to be smooth sailing.

gigabyte needs to answer for this!!! why mobos get bricked by a simple setting!! this is outrageous. we have to come together and voice our concern. there seems to be a huge problem with these gigabyte bioses

I agree man. It doesn't make sense that we cannot even enter BIOS. I raised a ticket on the Gigabyte website, they say they'll get back in 3-5 days. If they get back with anything helpful, I'll post it here.

 

[Ma.Rio]

I've written to gigabyte's support as well and I doubt they'll have anything useful to say. I'm out of warranty so I'm on my own.
As I said there's dozens of posts all over the internet (on this forum, on other forums, on reddit..) with people having the same issue. None of them have a fix. A few said that their mobo magically started working again, but no solution.
The guy from reddit is still waiting for the technician to try to fix it, but I doubt he'll do anything. There's no useful info on that thread, just him and I talking like we do here.
I will most probably call a service shop now since I can't afford to waste any more time (even though I'm already heavily damaged by this). I'm afraid the only solution to this is a bios reflash, or even worse a new mobo.
I'll post an update if anything interesting happens.

 

[DRagor]

C'mon guys. Don't blame manufacturer for your own faults. You don't go into BIOS messing with some settings if you don't know what you're doing. There are even worse things that can happen to your PC if you set the wrong BIOS settings. Yes, you can even burn the whole thing up by setting wrong voltages for example.

I had received a warning asking me to disable CSM, which I sadly ignored

Not that it would probably matter if you did that. But this is a kind of warning that has to make you stop what you're doing and think "what can go wrong if I set it up?"

As far as solving the problem, the only advice I can give you would be: unplug GPU, unplug all drives, remove all but one stick of ram, reset CMOS - in that order. Then start the PC and let it try as long as it takes - after few failed boot attempts the board MAY try something different which hopefully will give you access to BIOS. If it does, you'll have to disable secure boot (which may take few tries as well) and start with rebuilding.

 

[shaikyahiya]

C'mon guys. Don't blame manufacturer for your own faults. You don't go into BIOS messing with some settings if you don't know what you're doing. There are even worse things that can happen to your PC if you set the wrong BIOS settings. Yes, you can even burn the whole thing up by setting wrong voltages for example.

Not that it would probably matter if you did that. But this is a kind of warning that has to make you stop what you're doing and think "what can go wrong if I set it up?"

As far as solving the problem, the only advice I can give you would be: unplug GPU, unplug all drives, remove all but one stick of ram, reset CMOS - in that order. Then start the PC and let it try as long as it takes - after few failed boot attempts the board MAY try something different which hopefully will give you access to BIOS. If it does, you'll have to disable secure boot (which may take few tries as well) and start with rebuilding.

I'll try that. I know it's mostly my fault.. should've stopped after seeing the warning.

 

[Ma.Rio]

C'mon guys. Don't blame manufacturer for your own faults. You don't go into BIOS messing with some settings if you don't know what you're doing. There are even worse things that can happen to your PC if you set the wrong BIOS settings. Yes, you can even burn the whole thing up by setting wrong voltages for example.

Not that it would probably matter if you did that. But this is a kind of warning that has to make you stop what you're doing and think "what can go wrong if I set it up?"

As far as solving the problem, the only advice I can give you would be: unplug GPU, unplug all drives, remove all but one stick of ram, reset CMOS - in that order. Then start the PC and let it try as long as it takes - after few failed boot attempts the board MAY try something different which hopefully will give you access to BIOS. If it does, you'll have to disable secure boot (which may take few tries as well) and start with rebuilding.

Thank you for your reply but I do not agree with you.
Yes, messing with the bios can be a risky endeavor, but it should almost never completely brick your motherboard. We weren't messing with voltages and overclocking and similar stuff (and even if we were - almost every mobo has safety checks that will detect that something is wrong and just revert to default settings or give you an error). Secure boot isn't the nuclear launch code. And if Microsoft is publically talking about it and even requiring it for Win11, you know it's not THAT big of a deal.
Both OP and I accept personal responsibility - if we didn't mess with it we wouldn't have the problem. But the obvious blame here is on gigabyte and their buggy bios. Who knows which other option can just randomly brick your board? And how in the earth does the cmos reset not completely reset the board to factory settings. This happened to lots of people (just google it and see how many results pop up), and most of them are tech-savvy. There is no way that changing a simple setting bricks the whole system probably beyond repair.
As for your suggestion, I didn't do it completely that way, but I did try multiple combinations:
no gpu, no ssd, no cmos battery, shorting the clr_cmos pins, no ram, only 1 stick of ram, trying to force some backup bios even though I don't know if my mobo has that...
I sent it finally to a repair shop, it's up to them now. I fear that it's either gonna be a bios reflash if it's even possible, or buying a completely new mobo which is just a great idea during this chip shortage.

Also wthatdo we do about Win11 then. Even if we somehow revive our boards are we locked out of the OS even though we meet the necessary requirements?

 

[DRagor]

@Ma.Rio
Yes you are right they could add more safety checks. Yes, there are boards out there that let you enable secure boot and then NOT execute it because they detect something that's incompatible with it (and the angry user comes here and says "SB is enabled in BIOS but Win says it isn't"). But on the other hand, you can't expect low-end board such as H110 will have all features the more expensive stuff gets.

And if Microsoft is publically talking about it and even requiring it for Win11, you know it's not THAT big of a deal

Disagree with that. It is THAT big of a deal. Even if MS made it feel otherwise.

Also wtf do we do about Win11 then. Even if we somehow revive our boards are we locked out of the OS even though we meet the necessary requirements?

Right now you don't meet requirements, as W11 needs 8th gen CPU and best you can have on H110 is 7th gen. This can change in future as MS is going to test 7th gen CPUs for compatibility soon. But if/when this changes it will be time to worry about how to safely enable secure boot on your board. Oh, yea, I've got Gigabyte board too. And I'm going to wait till someone (Gigabyte, MS, maybe Intel) publishes exact info how to do that safely.

 

[verigoodtomyou]

b450 gigabyte aorus board i had is not low end thouh! there are reports coming from gigabyte x470s, z370s, z490s, z390s, all kinds of giga boards can brick themselves while enabling secure boot! clearly, we may be doing something wrong.

 

[yahya+-6]

i have the exact same motherboard and i have enabled intel ptt which is (TPM 2.0) then i found that windows 11 still needs secure boot enabled so i disabled CSM and secure boot options appeared so i clicked them and it said secure boot not activated then i clicked on attempt secure boot and changed it into enabled and saved. the pc worked but it didn't boot to windows it booted to the bios again. so i discarded this changes and here i am working with my pc just fine. after some days searching i found out that my hdd needs to be GPT not MBR so i can changed the option named (storage boot option control) and change it from Legacy to UEFI so the PC can boot from windows and not the bios. But for now after i have seen all these people having the same problems especially with a motherboard like mine... am gonna wait for the full release of windows 11.

 

[shaikyahiya]

As far as solving the problem, the only advice I can give you would be: unplug GPU, unplug all drives, remove all but one stick of ram, reset CMOS - in that order. Then start the PC and let it try as long as it takes - after few failed boot attempts the board MAY try something different which hopefully will give you access to BIOS. If it does, you'll have to disable secure boot (which may take few tries as well) and start with rebuilding.

Tried that, didn't work.
Can I flash the BIOS again with a USB drive using Q-Flash? I cannot find the Q-Flash button on the motherboard though... Do I have to unscrew it from the cabinet to find it? Do you suggest doing it?

 

[DRagor]

Tried that, didn't work.
Can I flash the BIOS again with a USB drive using Q-Flash? I cannot find the Q-Flash button on the motherboard though... Do I have to unscrew it from the cabinet to find it? Do you suggest doing it?

As far as I know your board does not have such button. According to Q-flash manual, you access Q-Flash by pressing END key during POST. However even if that works you won't be able to do much without working display.

 

[Ma.Rio]

We don't even get to post. Nothing shows up and no sounds are made. It fails to post and retries every 3-4 seconds. You don't get to access the bios.

 

[DRagor]

We don't even get to post. Nothing shows up and no sounds are made. It fails to post and retries every 3-4 seconds. You don't get to access the bios.

Looks like I have to agree Gigabyte screwed up here. This kind of failure I've only seen after failed BIOS updates.

 

[shaikyahiya]

They got back with the least helpful response:

https://imgur.com/Hz0cv4U

I guess I'm taking it to the technician now.

 

[shaikyahiya]

We don't even get to post. Nothing shows up and no sounds are made. It fails to post and retries every 3-4 seconds. You don't get to access the bios.

Bro, do you happen to have a CPU without integrated graphics? I'm trying to figure out other commonalities in our builds that are preventing us to get to post.

 

[Ma.Rio]

Nope, I do have integrated graphics. And that response is just what I expected. And it took them 3 days to respond.

 

[Ma.Rio]

Shaikyahiya, did you change anything about platform keys?

 

[shaikyahiya]

Shaikyahiya, did you change anything about platform keys?

Nope. I am rather unfamiliar with it.
Btw, I took mine to the technician, he checked it and thinks it's bricked. I have no option but to buy a new one. I am thinking of upgrading to 10/11th gen processor now.
Thank you Gigabyte

 

[Ma.Rio]

RIP...
I was supposed to get a call today. They're probably gonna call tomorrow and say the same thing. What a waste of my time.
As for upgrading, I think it's still a bad time even for motherboards, not to mention CPUs. I'll have to stick to my Skylake.

 

[shaikyahiya]

Why is it a bad time? I have been wanting to upgrade for some time now... I finalized this btw:
i5-11400f
Gigabyte B560M DS3H (Yeah, Gigabyte again because these vendors don't have ASUS)

 

[Ma.Rio]

LOL bro I'm not buying Gigabyte boards ever again. The same thing is literally gonna happen to you again. It's gonna run the same BIOS with the same bug. And you'll need secure boot sooner or later, you can't avoid it for to long. Waste of money if you ask me. And it's a bad time because of the chip shortage - half the tech is unavailable and the other half is 3x the price.

 

[shaikyahiya]

Yeah, the prices are in a surge. But do you think things will improve anytime soon? Every news article I read, says the chip shortage is going to be a long-lasting problem. 🙁
Aaaaaagh!