# Fixed a Gigabyte GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5 (corrupt master BIOS)



## Jstn7477 (May 9, 2016)

I wanted to share my experience with repairing the Gigabyte motherboard listed in the title of this thread as I saw on Newegg that many people also had the same problem with this board and thought it was actually dead after anywhere from 1-8 months of use. Anyway, my father knocked on my door requesting tech support and I walked into our home office to find my mom's computer turning on for a few seconds, turning off, and turning on again repeatedly (sometimes with slight variations in the power on duration, but no more than a few seconds). I also noticed that the PCB gap between the audio codec circuit and the rest of the board would not glow red as well, and the board exhibited the same symptoms even with the RAM removed (no beeps). So, I removed the disk drives and took the case into my room for further inspection. The RTC battery checked out fine and board still displayed the same symptoms, even with a power supply swap as well as messing with the RAM modules individually.

So, I started fiddling around a bit desperately with the board, figuring it might just be the BIOS that had somehow corrupted as dad was just doing Windows updates when the computer suddenly bluescreened and went into its current state, so I tried clearing the CMOS RAM a couple times trying to provoke the board to load the slave BIOS as the automatic system was of course not working, and there are no switches on the board to change active BIOS chips like my X99-UD5 WIFI.* I became a bit annoyed and rapidly tapped a screw against the CLR CMOS header a few times, letting go instantly when the board was going to shut off from doing so, and after three randomly spaced taps within a second or two, the audio circuit LEDs came on and about 20 seconds later a single beep and my TV hooked up to VGA displaying a screen telling me my BIOS settings were reset.* I quickly went into BIOS and it said it was version F1, and I knew I had flashed F3 on there back in October 2015, so it was definitely running on the slave BIOS, and I then flashed it to F4 right away with Q-Flash in the BIOS. The system restarted fine, but powering off and back on left me with the original problem.

I "hotwired" the system and tricked it into booting off of the slave BIOS once more with the drives reinstalled, and Windows booted fine, so I decided to go to Gigabyte's website and look for @bios to see if I could flash the master BIOS chip again. While scrolling down the utilities page, I found *"Gigabyte Firmware Update Utility"* and decided to give it a try, so I installed it, and sure enough after finding where it installed, there was an application named something like "DualBiosRescue.exe" which I clicked on and told it to update my BIOS. I shut down after that, pulled the power cord for a few minutes, tried again and sure enough the board was REPAIRED! I then proceeded to update some drivers and and also install the Thunderbolt driver along with upgraded USB 3.1 controller firmware, and everything is still fine. 

I hope anyone stumbling across this on Google finds it useful when this particular Gigabyte board's master BIOS corrupts itself (maybe it works for other newer DualBIOS setups?), and like it did for me, it might save you the frustration of an RMA and several weeks of downtime. Thank you for reading!


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## Adrian-AU (Jul 7, 2016)

Hi! I also wanted to share my experience with this board and as this is the first result in Google if you look for “GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5 BIOS problem/corrupt”. My issue was not exactly the same, but the OP helped me to troubleshoot it.

Without any reason I decided to *update my BIOS to version F4* (2016/03/10)… because you know, it’s cool to do it. I did it through Gigabyte WIN 10 software, everything went well till reboot. After flashing, the board was locked in an infinite boot loop. No POST, no beep but lights and fans were on. Nothing was happening and every 20 seconds it would reboot again.

First I tried clear to CMOS, no luck. Tried removing the battery, nope. Then I found this thread and a keyword on the OP got my attention. He mentioned he “hotwired” the board so I tried to understand what that was. That search led to me to this post were they talked about shorting two pins in the main BIOS in order to let the second BIOS kick in:

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/33904-how-fix-dead-dual-bios-motherboard-if-flashing-failed.html

Tried that, no luck. In that same thread they talked about shorting another pair of pins but they warn that it can fry your board if you miss the right one. Just before transforming my board in a BBQ, I did what’s recommended in this situations: *leave only one RAM and disconnect everything else (SDD,GPU,xtra RAM)*. Doing that, brought my board back to life! Not sure why I didn’t do that on the first place… anyway.

I went straight to the BIOS setup and I noticed that the F4 BIOS was flashed correctly but decided to flash it back to F1. Flash went OK, I powered off, connected the SSD and I was back in Windows. Next step was to add the GPU & RAMs. Did that and I was back to the boot loop! WTF?!

In a nutshell, RAM was the issue. I was using 2 DIMMs in dual channel using the red slots. *Solution was to move them to the black slots.*

Yeah, makes no sense. Let me remind you that at this point I was back using the same BIOS version (F1) and BIOS setup profile as I’ve been using for the last 6 months… but now, memory on the black slots.
RAM is HyperX Fury 2x8Gb.

I created a post in Gigabyte UK forum to see if someone has an explanation about what happened here.

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php?topic=17574.0

Cheers!


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## joecool9999 (Dec 26, 2016)

*Solution was to move them to the black slots.*

It is bizzare.  I moved mine to the RED slots and I got at least 8GB working out of 16GB installed.  I originally attempted to install 32GB of Patriot Viper RAM (PC4-17000, 2133MHz).  No idea how to fix this and all 32GB working.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 26, 2016)

joecool9999 said:


> *Solution was to move them to the black slots.*
> 
> It is bizzare.  I moved mine to the RED slots and I got at least 8GB working out of 16GB installed.  I originally attempted to install 32GB of Patriot Viper RAM (PC4-17000, 2133MHz).  No idea how to fix this and all 32GB working.


Memory cant be hit or miss if its not on the approved vendors list.


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## joecool9999 (Dec 27, 2016)

Indeed.

I just went with the following instead:

Model: CMK16GX4M2B3000C15
Manufacturer: Corsair

Everything works fine now.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 29, 2016)

Great! Glad its [SOLVED] !!


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