Last May, when I tried to upgrade a motherboard that had trouble recovering from hibernation under Windows 7, I ran into an unpleasant problem: after the BIOS upgrade, the system refused to boot. No BIOS screen, nothing. I do have a test card that shows POST (BIOS diagnostic) codes during boot, but even with its help, I could not revive the board; clearly, its BIOS was busted.
Or perhaps not. Today, I looked at that motherboard again: Same symptoms. But then, for no particular reason that I can remember, I decided to remove memory modules from this board and reinsert them in different slots. Much to my astonishment, the board came back to life!
My guess is that either this was an unfortunate coincidence (a bad contact occurring just as I was rebooting after the BIOS flash) or, much more likely, the new BIOS did not like the particular combination of memory slots that I was using (I picked the two slots farthest from the CPU to minimize heating.)
Whatever the reason, the board now works fine. So what am I to do with it? I really don’t need it anymore (this is a board with a single-core CPU and I now have several dual-core boards either in test machines or as spares). Perhaps I should put it up on eBay while it is still worth something?