Scrambled BIOS

[GuruX]

I have an ABit AT8-32X motherboard, and recently I noticed the BIOS started becoming scrambled. I can't pinpoint the exact time this happened, but it was sometime after I upgraded from an IDE to a SATA DVD-Writer. Basically, some menu items would appear garbled with weird text (kind of like a corrupted text file).

Today I went to re-flash the BIOS with the latest version (12), and it fixed most of the corruption -- but not all. The following pictures illustrate the problem:

Selecting a boot device (where I originally noticed a glitch)

Power Management settings

Any idea what could cause this?

 

[RangerSVT]

Have you tried resetting the cmos?

That definitely looks really weird, I've never seen that happen before

 

[GuruX]

When flashing the BIOS, I had the option to clear the CMOS which I did. I haven't tried removing the jumper that wipes the CMOS though.

 

[Sniper_Merc]

Try removing the DVD drive, see if it corrects itself.

I have seen this happen before, usually with a bad CD/DVD drive, or one that was jumpered incorrectly, IE and IDE cd drive set to slave when another one is already set to slave on the same cable, or there is just a flat incompatability between the two drives, requiring one be set to master or slave and the second set to cable select. Though I haven't seen it happen on SATA lines before, I havent used a SATA dvd drive either.

Only once have I seen this type of behavior on an actual hard drive. Last year when one of my 320 gig storage drives started to die, it happend then, and it was a SATA drive, it wouls also reset the heads a lot and sometimes freeze the bios.