The scariest thing happen to me last night after a very long gaming session. If you read this blog you know my daily driver is a Hackintosh. I try not to upgrade or tweak it too much considering it’s my daily work machine. Here’s what happened:
Earlier in the night, I had bounce the machine to reboot it into Windows 7 so that I could play some serious Battlefield 4. After about 6 hours or so (okay, maybe 8), I finally shut down for the night. I always reboot back into the Mac side so that I don’t have to worry about rebooting in the morning, etc. This time, when I rebooted, I heard my machine “clunk” twice. Yes – “clunk” – not a simple click or beep. Once the machine powered up the display, I got this error (image stolen from internet):
I was stunned. It was in the early morning and I didn’t know what to do. I simply waited till the BIOS had finally copied over. I have zero idea why the BIOS would go bad/corrupted. I haven’t cracked open my case in months. That changed last night. I cracked that case open and sat there on the ground acting I could possibly DO something. Very similar to that guy with the broken down car on the side of the road, with him standing under the hood looking competitive. Nothing to do but wait.
Once the machine was up, my Clover boot loader popped up with one less drive for available options. This wasn’t a good sign. However, my OX Mavericks partition was available so I went ahead and tried to boot from it. No dice. The system would load to the point where it was loading the Sound drivers and almost hang. It would throw garbage on the monitor – along with a circle with a slash though it. I thought it could have been a video driver issue, etc.
After a number of reboots to go into single user and safe mode – no joy. I couldn’t even get into the Windows dri
ves I have on the rig. I went into the CMOS and finally saw what was causing the issue – the BIOS had ‘reverted’ back to IDE mode for the drives. Once I set the drives to be AHCI – back to normal! Lesson learned: even though you have a back up BIOS, you need to check the settings to ensure any customizations are still there.
I’m very impress with the way Gigabyte’s board was able to ‘recover’ from the bad BIOS. If it weren’t for that, I would probablybe buying a new motherboard this weekend. Good on you Gigabyte!
JT
Edit Post – another feature I had to turn on in BIOS: Intel Virtualization Technology – Enabled. Otherwise my 64-bit Win7 VM in Fusion would not load. doh.