I mistakenly flashed the bios of the bedroom Media Center recently for no other reason than why not, and what happened? Checksum errors every time I tried to change the settings within the bios – typical.

It would boot OK with the default settings, but that’s hardly ideal. It’s a Gigabyte P31 ES3G and I jumped from bios F6 to F13 which may have been a leap too far in one upgrade. To fix it I double checked everything, from checking and replacing the battery to reseting the bios a dozen times by shorting the jumpers, each time trying a different technique read from the internet, but no matter what it just wouldn’t boot with anything other than it’s default settings; any changes would bring up a checksum error.

The solution was rather simple and unexpected; unplug the PC from the mains for an extended period even with the battery still in.

It came about being unplugged for a couple of days while I tested the new kitchen Media Center PC in its place (yes, another HTPC, and ironically made up of the aBit AM2 motherboard that use to run in the bedroom but was too unstable booting to be relied upon but since rebuilt has now shown great stability) and when put back in place after moving the new kitchen PC downstairs, it cleared itself; result!

Now as for the kitchen HTPC, it’s a micro ATX board squeezed into a micro ATX case given to me by a friend as a dumped PC (recycling at its best), and along with a spare HDD from the lounge PC (cos’ the lounge is now SSD), some new 4Gb of RAM, a cheap DVB-S card (a Compro VideoMate S350), and swappping out the decent PSU from the ancient office PC (a P4 that now works with the PSU from the friends dumped PC), it’s a PC from the ashes, a phoenix.

Even though my other systems currently reside in the attic I wanted this one to live local in the kitchen so it would become a hub-of-the-house more easily, so it was a challenge of getting some co-ax for the DVB-S card, and a network cable down into the top of the kitchen cupboards. But armed with 43cm of 19mm flat wood bit, I took some very careful measurements, aimed at the kitchen ceiling and started drilling, checking every few inches for electrics or unexpected plumbing and luckily enough to come out exactly where I wanted it to, at the bottom of the bedroom wardrobe where I could then simply run the wiring up through a hole in the ceiling over to the rest of the systems. Phew.

I’ll sort some photos out of this new work in the upcoming days.