Asus P5LD2 Deluxe needs current BIOS to support Processor
Asus is my favorite motherboard to use for build your own computers. Tech support has generally been pretty good, but once in a while…
When the P5LD2 Deluxe board came out, it “supported” the Pentium “D” processor at 3.0Ghz, but not with the BIOS that shipped with it. The machine wouldn’t even POST. So how do you upgrade a BIOS in a PC that won’t boot up?
One way is to call Asus BIOS department and give them $5 for a new BIOS. That worked a couple of times, then they started sending me BIOS’s that didn’t work. I don’t know if they were defective or just had old code in them, and when I called they would send me another. But twice I went through about 4 of these before I got a good one. Eventually the boards started shipping with the right BIOS.
Another way is to throw away money on a lower grade processor (that I wouldn’t want otherwise) that the old BIOS does support, boot the machine, upgrade the BIOS, then change processors. I’m too cheap to spend $200 or so for a BIOS upgrade only processor.
The third way is to have 1 machine that does boot, extract the BIOS while the machine is running (carefully!) and put in the BIOS that won’t work (carefully!) and upgrade it. Unfortunately, Asus put a chassis fan connector right up against the BIOS socket which makes it tough to get the proper tool on it.
This problem essentially resolved itself a year or year and a half ago. But I had to RMA a P5LD2 Deluxe a couple of weeks ago, and when I got the board back and it wouldn’t boot. If I took the memory out, I got the memory missing beeps, but it would not POST all assembled.
I called tech support and mentioned this old BIOS problem and was assured that since I got the missing memory beeps, that couldn’t be it. Probably bad memory. Wrong, works in another PC, etc.
Well the board is grounding on the case, take it out. Nope, I’m not gonna fall for that.
So I (carefully) grabbed a working BIOS, popped it the RMA board and viola (sp), it worked!
So I performed the “hot bios upgrade” mentioned above, and with the loss of only about 2 - 3 hours of time (argh!) it’s all working.
