My P6EX-Me mainboard was infected by the
w95.CIH virus which has wiped out my BIOS as well as my hard drive. All
I get is a black screen power on. I heard that I may be able to use the
boot-block BIOS feature to recover. I was also told that if I use this
procedure I will not have any video display through my AGP or PCI slots.
Does anyone know if this procedure is possible and what I need to do
it? If it is not possible are there any other options are short of replacing the motherboard?

Michael Faria

At one point (years ago!) I made a lot of changes to my bios (Pentium 90) saved changes and rebooted to a black screen. No bios at all. I remembered a time when working on an old 286 there was some kind of reset jumper near the battery area. The old IBM did not have a reset button on the outside of the case but these 3 pins were named reset. What they did was reset the bios to the original settings. Hoping there was a similar group of jumpers, got a flash light and checked every jumper on the mother board and near the battery found a 3 pin set marked rset with a jumper on pin 1 and 2. While the computer was turned off I moved the jumper to pins 2 and 3 turned the computer on for 4 or 5 seconds then turned the computer off. I tnen moved the jumper back to pin 1 and 2, crossed my fingers and turned the computer back on and there it was my bios. I had to reset most all of the settings but was just glad it was working. I have a new ASUS P2B-D and checked it carefully before installing to verify and locate all the jumpers and their settings, and right around the clock battery there was two solder connections (not pins) that were marked rset. According to the note I found on the ASUS web site if you short the pins out while the computer was on it would drop the bios back to the factory settings. The area that they are located in would have been difficult to get to and require an extremely steady hand but if done right the bios comes back up. Another time when this happened (P-166) I just gave up and left the computer on and went for a walk. Came back home and Win 95 was on the screen. Shut the whole system down and turned it back on. After 6 minutes and 30 seconds the award bios actually showed up on the screen and the system began its regular boot (really wierd. I removed everything from the system except the floppy drive and the video card and turned the system on. Bios came up right away so began to install one device at a time. Never found out what caused the problem because once everything was installed the system worked perfectly so I really don't know what I did to make it work as there were no pins on the board to reset the bios. I would try this just to see what happens. Hope this may help!

boot block BIOS is something that certain BIOSs have, others don't. If yours does support this, you need to put an ISA video card in to get to it.

You can then boot from a floppy and run the BIOS flash utility for your mainboard. You will need to get this file and utility from the web site of your mainboard manufacturer. Do you know the brand and model?

Thanks for the advice but nu dice.
My board manufactured by ECS model P6EX-Me
only has two jumpers on the board. One is for audio the other, near the battery is labeled CMOS reset. When I move this jumper to the reset position it does not allow me to power on, when I move it back it has no effect. The BIOS is from Award SN-129919189. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Far972

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!! Be super careful when working with BIOS flashing options, you can fry your mainboard if you guess wrong !!! One thing - always make ABSOLUTELY sure that ALL caches on your main board are disabled - otherwise the BIOS will fry them when it is flashed. The pins are usually jumpered together for at least 20 seconds with POWER OFF in order to use them to reset the BIOS CMOS, but AWARD BIOS chips have specific utilities that must be run in order to do the job right. Also - not all BIOS CMOS's are the same voltage. You may have a set of jumpers on your board that select either 5 or 12 volts as the "Flash" voltage... The wrong choice here can also be damaging. In the worst case scenario - BIOS's can be ordered from the M/B manufacturer for about 10 bucks, but you have to wait for them to arrive. Alternately (sounds like best choice) you can get an
up-to-date main board, with more options. For more info see: http://www.erols.com/chare/index.html
-That is not my website by the way, It is a very good source of info however. Best of luck!

Well, I certainly agree that you need to be cautious. But it sounds like your machine is in pretty bad shape already, so it is probably worth a shot.

I believe the information you need is at this site:

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ecs/ecs/p6ex-me/p6ex-me-b.htm

Update......Thanks for all the help. I tried numerous methods to recover but in the end I called up ECS and ordered a new BIOS for 10 bucks. I didn't realize I could get one so cheap!!

What exactly did you order? A new chip that you need to put onto your mainboard? Did you ever try flashing it with a software update?

Just curious...

I couldn't flash the old chip because I was unable to use my floppy drive. I actually ordered the new bios chip which I installed on my mainboard, those pins are a royal pain in the ***. Anyways I got it in and all is well for now............ ;-)

Great! Glad to hear you are back up and running.

I know what you mean about those pins - not exactly for the faint of heart. But, not as bad as trying to unbend the pins on a Pentium CPU that someone dropped...

Anyway, I'll go ahead and close this now.