The last week has been a bit … interesting for me. On the 14th my new computer wouldn’t boot, everything that I tried didn’t work, as I had to go to work, and wouldn’t get home again until very late, I left it for Friday night.
On Friday I took the computer down and removed the side panel to see what the diagnostic LEDs were showing. ’00’ – That code is probably one of the worst ones that you can get. Generally it means that the UEFI/BIOS isn’t loading for whatever reason. Without the UEFI/BIOS, your computer is a brick. Thankfully the motherboard that I purchased has a backup bios, accessed via a switch on the motherboard. Only it also wasn’t working, due to a bug, which meant that I would need to upgrade the UEFI/BIOS to a newer version. I downloaded the latest version of the UEFI from the manufacturers website and put it on a USB stick. first I decided to try the upgrade on the bad UEFI, it didn’t work, but upgrading the working ‘backup’ UEFI did work.
Before I put my computer back in place I decided to try the bad UEFI again and suddenly… I got the error that the backup UEFI had been giving before I upgraded it to the latest version. I tried the upgrade again, which worked this time, then I tried booting… ’00’ the UEFI that had died was gone again. I switched to the backup again and started the machine, and saw a message that the CMOS (Storage for UEFI) had been reset. I set my UEFI settings again, ran Windows for a while on my test bench, and decided to flip the switch to the old UEFI one last time before I put the machine back in its place (I really wanted to still have the backup, just in case) finally the machine booted on the UEFI that had been giving the error ’00’
Since then I have had my machine running properly, I have a working backup UEFI/BIOS so hopefully I’ll be able to fix this sooner if it ever happens again. (I really hope that this doesn’t happen again… It’s not fun having a computer that’s essentially a brick.)