Bill said:
I have a Gigabyte S-Series GA-G31M-ES2L Motherboard. When I go into CMOS
settings <DEL> the <Load Fail-Safe Defaults>, <Load Optimized Defaults> and
<Set Supervisor/User Password> are greyed. I'm not aware of anything I have
done to change this. Can anyone help please?
Thanks.
Bill R
I tried a quick look at a couple pages of reviews for the motherboard on Newegg,
but don't see any matching symptoms. I didn't read all of these, so you
might take a look here.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357
In terms of features, your board has dual BIOS chips. It has a "clear CMOS"
jumper. It also features CMOS content storage via "profiles". You can
save a set of BIOS CMOS settings, and I presume they're being stored
in one of the BIOS flash chips.
The most simple solution, might be to try to clear the CMOS. Item 15 in
the manual, recommends turning off and unplugging the computer before
attempting to use the clear CMOS jumper. It appears you have a two pin
header, and you short the two pins for a period of time to clear
the CMOS. (Proof the clear worked, is the RTC time should be reset to
something other than 2010.)
Now, if that didn't work, there is a small possibility the board is sensing
the CMOS battery voltage and has concluded the battery is flat. But I don't
really buy that theory, as it seems to be overly protective for nothing.
Using the "profiles" concept, you could happily live forever without
replacing the CMOS battery, by just loading a profile each time you
power up the computer. The advantage of profiles, is it allows CMOS
settings to be saved in flash, and avoids having to worry about the
battery going flat. So greying out settings, because the battery is
flat, doesn't seem very reasonable. A more likely reason, is the
board thinks there is password protection or something.
A "profile" would be invalidated, if the BIOS revision is updated.
I'm unaware of any board featuring "profiles", which has the
concept of keeping the majority of the previous settings. The same
goes for any motherboard offering software to save CMOS settings
to a file. If you flash the BIOS, the old CMOS settings may not
align with the new BIOS (strange as it seems, they can't maintain
the same data structures between releases, which boggles the mind).
The battery voltage on a CR2032, should be 3.0V or a little higher. If
you have a multimeter, you can touch the chassis with the black meter
lead, and touch the (+) on the top of the battery with the red
meter lead, and take a voltage reading. And you can do that, without
having to do anything more than take the side off the computer. The
computer does not charge that battery. Battery current can only
flow one way, as there is a diode which prevents reverse current
flow. (CR2032 batteries are not safe to charge, which is why the
diode is there.)
To entirely flush the "state" on your computer would require
1) Flashing both BIOS chips, or at least flashing the BIOS which is
currently being used to boot the computer. Doing such a flash,
may erase the "profiles", as I expect they're just a segment in
the BIOS flash.
2) Clear the CMOS. Clearing the CMOS may also be available from the
BIOS flashing tool. Clearing the DMI is also an available option -
DMI is an inventory of the current hardware in the computer, as well
as fixed strings a system builder might store in there. But DMI should
not be affecting the ability to do stuff in the BIOS. As far as I
know, it is there mainly for records keeping applications.
I don't really like to unnecessarily flash the BIOS, but if you want
to solve the problem, it might come to that. I would try to flash the
same version of BIOS you have now. Maybe less could go wrong that way.
In any case, before you flash a BIOS, you should back up whatever is
currently stored in the BIOS chips. (Some flashing tools have the
option to archive the current image.) If you get in trouble, and the
flash update is failing, your last ditch effort would be to flash
the old image back into the board. *Never* press reset on the motherboard,
to initiate a POST, unless there is a valid BIOS stored in the flash,
because after that it would be bricked. Since I suspect your board
uses serial flash chips, soldered to the motherboard, options
on "bricking" are a bit limited.
As far as I know, the Gigabyte "dual BIOS" concept is not bulletproof.
While there are two BIOS flash chips, I think there is only one copy
of "boot block", which is part of what bootstraps the computer at
startup. If you foul up the chip with the boot block in it, I
believe it is possible to "brick" a Gigabyte board. At work, we
built a product with a dual BIOS, and included a third chip (state
machine) for organizing which chip is used to boot (making the two chips
completely independent of one another). As far as I know, Gigabyte
doesn't do that, and instead relies on a single boot block, followed
by the boot block choosing to load either one of the two redundant
main BIOS code blocks. So there might still be some risk involved
with the Gigabyte approach. It is probably possible to brick a
Gigabyte dual BIOS board by flashing it, if you put the effort
into it.
Paul
