my friend just updated his bois and when he did that some reason it saved the drivers in c drive he then formated the drive. he lost his bios drivers and is unable to install anything.
any ideas on how to get it back?

When you update your BIOS, it overwrites the actual CMOS chip on your motherboard (the physical hardware). Not on the C:\ drive or such. It's possible for an error to have occurred when your friend flashed his BIOS, therefore resulting in an unusable computer.

Go to the website of the motherboard manufacturer and download the latest BIOS flash update onto a floppy. Have your friend run it via DOS and hopefully it'll fix the problem.

What if your BIOS was flashed, and the system will not even POST? Am I going to have to replace the whole mobo?

Hmm, if he flashed it wrong it may be a problem, do you know if he really flashed the CMOS? If not then just clear the CMOS using the clear CMOS jumper next to the battery on the motherboard, it consist of 3 pins and has the jumper normally across 1-2, set it accross 2-3 then power on the pc and it should go straight to the BIOS and you can set it to factory defaults and then shutdown, put the jumper back across 1-2 and it should work.

If your lucky your motherboard may have a dual BIOS feature, some Gigabyte boards have this and you can select the other BIOS when you first turn on the machine, but most motherboards do not feature this. I think he updated his system drivers, and tried to reload his pc because if he flashed his BIOS unsuccessfully then he would not have been able to format the PC to begin with- in that case he will probably have to download drivers to another pc and copy to CD then use the CD to install the drivers on his PC.

Forget trying to reset it. cscgal has the perfect and safest way to fix the problem. Flashing the BIOS is different then reseting the BIOS information.

Flashing actually writes to a non-volatile memory, which will remain even if you remove the tiny battery, reset it, remove it from the mother board, run over with a H2, or eat it. It writes the basic program (Basic Input Output System) to a the chip.

Reseting the BIOS simply erases the data from a volatile memory (the CMOS), which is used by the BIOS itself. Sort of a database for the BIOS.

A misnomer, but we have to live with it.

Just remove the cmos battery for about 5 minutes and replace...reboot and go to the cmos setup.

Hows it going everyone, i got a major problem i just upgraded/fixed my computer but it didn't show anything on the screen when i turned it on (moving the ram fixed that) when it turned on it showed the insert windows disc screen, i reset the computer and entered the setup and changed it to boot from HDD-0, CD , HDD-1 and now it doesn't show anything when i turn it on again... HELP PLEASE

I am having a similar problem, except that my issue is occurring on a Latitude X200 laptop. When I turn the power on, all that happens is the power light comes on. The computer does not access the HD, nor does it POST. I have tried going to Dell and downloading the bootable copy of the BIOS onto a floppy and the system does not access the floppy, which leads me to think it won't access the CD-ROM either.
So what do I do? OTHER THEN calling Dell, did that, the replacement board costs $800...

Aaron

I tried resetting the CMOS using the jumper (I have an ASUS A7V so there's just the two solder pins) and it didn't work.