Flashed BIOS... no video!

[anklebiter]

A friend of mine has me looking into a problem for him.

He is running an old Dell XPS D300. When he went to install a PCI USB card, his computer wouldn't recognize the new hardware. When he flashed the BIOS and restarted, there was no display and no beep codes. wtf? So I'm thinking I'd like him to revert back to the older version of the BIOS (A05 - he updated to A09), but w/o video, how is that possible?

Suggesions? Thanks guys!
Kata

[BigFuzzyArchon]

you gotta find out what buttons to press and when

[S1nF1xx]

Wow, did he get any errors durring the flashing process?

You could try resetting the BIOS with the jumper, or pull the CMOS battery for a few minutes and put it back in. Hopefully the reset will fix it. Otherwise you'd need a new BIOS chip. :(

[DVAmon]

Does the machine happen to have an onboard GPU as well as a GPU in an AGP or PCI slot?

Sometimes the Dells we have using slot-based GPUs will default to BIOS defaults and use the onboard card, and you would get no display if the monitor wasn't plugged into the onboard input.

Just something to consider, as always verify that all the components are seated correctly and he didn't receive any erros during the BIOS flash process as someone already mentioned earlier, discharging the CMOS, and all.

[lithium726]

Wow, did he get any errors durring the flashing process?

You could try resetting the BIOS with the jumper, or pull the CMOS battery for a few minutes and put it back in. Hopefully the reset will fix it. Otherwise you'd need a new BIOS chip. :(
if this is the case - if you have a socketed bios chip... hot flash!