I've been having problems where my computer wouldn't re-start properly, and found out that Tyan had a bios update. One of the "fixes" was "doesn't restart properly."

I went to all the work it takes to re-flash a bios (making boot disk, etc.), and ran the program. It went through the process, verified, and said "successful flash."

I rebooted, and got nothing except one long beep and two short ones. My Tyan manual said this was one of two "fatal errors," apparently a video problem.

Gak. My computer was now a complete brick, which wouldn't even get to the point of showing me the bios screen, never mind the point of booting from a floppy to flash the old bios back again.

Nothing worked. Would I actually have to order and replace the bios chip? Finally, I pulled the CMOS battery and replaced that. Sheer speculation, but what did I have to lose?

It worked. I had to screw with some bios settings that had gone back to defaults, and I had some false starts where it couldn't find the hard drives, but I lucked out eventually, and I seem to be back in business.

I hate this kind of thing.