Gigabyte Z270P - D3 No BIOS display

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3 Jan 2018
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Imagine my horror on first powering up with the CPU, Memory, SSD, front panel and PSU connected; only to get a blank screen and a beep. It was that "I've just gone through all of this for something that lights up orange and goes beep" feeling.

The Keyboard and mouse seemed to be alive though, and after a bit of panic I attached an old USB DVD drive with linx mint x64 in it, booted with that and pressed enter...

Yay! I have a working system... except the display drops out occasionally (with specific applications or websites) then returns - I'm sure this is a different but possibly related issue to the absence of BIOS as the symptoms are much less severe. With the BIOS (having pressed del during POST) it's a switch between a black screden and 'no signal' every three seconds or so. I am using the bord's HDMI port with an HDMI to SVGA adapter from the Raspberry Pi people and old SVGA monitor - could this be the cause?

I've done various things to compound my problems, such as using gparted to erase the UEFI partition of the SSD rendering it unbootable so I could boot from DVD again (thus supplying a work around for the boot order selection which is the only function I need the BIOS for right now)... except like an idiot I installed mint again in legacy mode... so gparted wont do the trick any more.

I'm stuck with Linux Mint unless I buy a new SSD so I can boot on one and format the other, or maybe I can see the BIOS with an HDMI monitor? I'd like to be able to flash the BIOS from linux but flashrom tells me:-

flashrom v0.9.9-rc1-r1942 on Linux 4.8.0-53-generic (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org

Calibrating delay loop... OK.
WARNING: No chipset found. Flash detection will most likely fail.
No EEPROM/flash device found.
Note: flashrom can never write if the flash chip isn't found automatically.

So, I guess I have to install windows to use the BIOS utility supplied with the board... except I can't access the BIOS menu to set the boot order so I can't install anything else.

Meantime I have shorted the CLR_CMOS pins on the board, so in theory the BIOS is now in recovery mode - which may be where it was from the beginning. It's going to grow into a mining rig so I will want to install the mining specific BIOS supplied by Gigabyte eventually.... but this is no use until I can actually see the damn BIOS menu.

Can I get there without buying more hardware? Is there something wrong with the motherboard? Could the HDMI-SVGA adapter be the cause? Are there better ways than flashrom to flash my BIOS from linux? Is there a way to format the disk the OS is running from, or otherwise render it unbootable so the system will boot from the DVD?

I'd rather not (a) purchase more hardware (b) fry the board by flashing the BIOS the wrong way (c) fry anything else by for e.g. booting a live USB then hot plugging the SSD in the hope of formatting it that way.

Any offers?
 
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