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After powering on PC daily, its W10 seems to always seem to show
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Flashed BIOS countless times on hardware and never had an issue What would happen if a PC had some bad memory locations in low memory ? It could cause a corrupted flash operation. In theory, a good computer design, has a BIOS split into two pieces. An immutable boot loader, plus a code load for the main code. When flashing, the code load is the only part that changes. Many manufacturers violate the rules, by also re-flashing the immutable boot loader. If the Flash operation dies while the immutable boot loader is zeroed out, you are... bricked. There are two possibilities with bad RAM present. 1) Flasher code crashes due to memory corruption. 2) Flasher data is corrupted by memory errors, causing the Flash image entered into the BIOS to be corrupted. On the reboot, the device is then bricked as it crashes on the bad code. Recovery is only possible if the immutable boot loader is actually not changed. Careful consideration is required when memory is not stable. You can help, by setting the memory clock to as stable a value as you can manage, turn up the Vnb a bit, do a memtest, and so on. Memtest is nice, in that the only part it cannot test, is 1MB of BIOS reserved memory. Memtest actually picks up the code segment of the program and "sweeps underneath". It's the most thorough test you can arrange for stuck-at faults. On motherboards with four memory slots, you can rearrange the sticks in single-channel mode, flip the High and Low sticks, run two memtest runs and get 100% test coverage. On a NUC this might be harder to arrange (dual channel but only one slot per channel). http://www.memtest.org Paul |
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