Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

[greyknight]

First of all, my machine:

AMD x2 4400+
2048GB RAM
Asus A8N-SLi motherboard
Asus EN6800GT 256MB pci-E video card
Running Windows Home Edition
(and Fedora on the side)

Here's my story:

Playing BF2 on Sunday, In warlord, I'm on the floor above the 2nd floor Palace Flag, about to try and waste some guys on the third floor capping my team's flag.

I get weird lag out of no where.... crap
My screen goes blank, ... crap some more
Nothing happens, no desktop, no monitor, no reset, nothing whatsoever.

I reboot my computer.
Loads BIOS.
Starts to boot off my HDD, but here's the fun part of what this game could have done: The boot stops in the middle and displays

GRUB

and moves no further, after several attempts to boot up, it has not succeeded.

The machine is clean, and all I have done is play BF2, now it don't work ... help!?

Well, here's the thing, I'm the real grey_knight, we're just sitting in an Engineering class... We're CompE students... I run an AMD X24800 with 2048 of RAM and 2 7800GTXs... I got the same error last night, in which the monitor went in to power-saving mode... However; I have two monitors... somehow, I was able to bring up the task manager and reboot from there... On the second monitor that is. No, GRUB, no nothing, I was back fragging in ~5 minutes. This has me terrorfied (sic, grammar Nazis, I like my neologisms) as I want to know if some ****er is transmitting a boot-virus through BF2 or if I merely recieved a story of what is about to happen to me... I should add, if CompE's are confused- something is real- *REAL*- wrong. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT!

Edit: Been reading a lot, instead of listening to my MEC-inspired physics prof, about how the latest PB update has been sodomizing people's machines in manners too evil to explain. No one else, however yields any similar problems... Since PB is not an OSS app, we have no idea whether they did something very wrong... Just throwing the suggestion out here, but I know this never happened before ~January 27th's eve.

[TheSpearman]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

First of all, my machine:

AMD x2 4400+
2048GB RAM
Asus A8N-SLi motherboard
Asus EN6800GT 256MB pci-E video card
Running Windows Home Edition
(and Fedora on the side)

Here's my story:

Playing BF2 on Sunday, In warlord, I'm on the floor above the 2nd floor Palace Flag, about to try and waste some guys on the third floor capping my team's flag.

I get weird lag out of no where.... crap
My screen goes blank, ... crap some more
Nothing happens, no desktop, no monitor, no reset, nothing whatsoever.

I reboot my computer.
Loads BIOS.
Starts to boot off my HDD, but here's the fun part of what this game could have done: The boot stops in the middle and displays

GRUB

and moves no further, after several attempts to boot up, it has not succeeded.

I'm inclined to to think it's either overheating, either the CPU or one of those 7800's or insufficient power if it's a recurring thing. Given the amount of hardware in it, an overloaded PSU is very possible.

[Hephaistion]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

First of all, my machine:

AMD x2 4400+
2048GB RAM
Asus A8N-SLi motherboard
Asus EN6800GT 256MB pci-E video card
Running Windows Home Edition
(and Fedora on the side)

Here's my story:

Playing BF2 on Sunday, In warlord, I'm on the floor above the 2nd floor Palace Flag, about to try and waste some guys on the third floor capping my team's flag.

I get weird lag out of no where.... crap
My screen goes blank, ... crap some more
Nothing happens, no desktop, no monitor, no reset, nothing whatsoever.

I reboot my computer.
Loads BIOS.
Starts to boot off my HDD, but here's the fun part of what this game could have done: The boot stops in the middle and displays

GRUB

and moves no further, after several attempts to boot up, it has not succeeded.

The machine is clean, and all I have done is play BF2, now it don't work ... help!?

Well, here's the thing, I'm the real grey_knight, we're just sitting in an Engineering class... We're CompE students... I run an AMD X24800 with 2048 of RAM and 2 7800GTXs... I got the same error last night, in which the monitor went in to power-saving mode... However; I have two monitors... somehow, I was able to bring up the task manager and reboot from there... On the second monitor that is. No, GRUB, no nothing, I was back fragging in ~5 minutes. This has me terrorfied (sic, grammar Nazis, I like my neologisms) as I want to know if some ****er is transmitting a boot-virus through BF2 or if I merely recieved a story of what is about to happen to me... I should add, if CompE's are confused- something is real- *REAL*- wrong. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT!

Edit: Been reading a lot, instead of listening to my MEC-inspired physics prof, about how the latest PB update has been sodomizing people's machines in manners too evil to explain. No one else, however yields any similar problems... Since PB is not an OSS app, we have no idea whether they did something very wrong... Just throwing the suggestion out here, but I know this never happened before ~January 27th's eve.

If you had been using your UAV you might have seen the Spec Ops run up and put C4 on your BIOS. Just drop a supply crate on it, you will be good to go!:laugh:

[greyknight]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

If I am not mistaken, I have a very sufficient power-supply and very sufficient cooling, on the affected computer even after ~15 hours of use, the ambient temperature never rises above 40... Since another forum asked this question.... No error messages came up. As for the supply crate, well... the Special ops guy is still there, he blew it up, and no some n00b with a command hack is spamming all my rightful magic supply crates elsewhere... I am thinking it is a problem with GRUB, and yes, we could use a WinXP command prompt trick involving the install CD to overwrite GRUB... thing is... GRUB is also the name of a lot of Boot-viruses, so... it might not be the grand unified boot-loader at all... See the confusion? Thankfully my rig, the one with all the 7800's has yet to be affected in quite that severe a manner... Time will tell if I am so lucky however. In the mean time, I remembered something else strange during my workaround... The second monitor goes grayscale at sub VGA resolution.

[Darksniper75]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

If I am not mistaken, I have a very sufficient power-supply and very sufficient cooling, on the affected computer even after ~15 hours of use, the ambient temperature never rises above 40... Since another forum asked this question.... No error messages came up. As for the supply crate, well... the Special ops guy is still there, he blew it up, and no some n00b with a command hack is spamming all my rightful magic supply crates elsewhere... I am thinking it is a problem with GRUB, and yes, we could use a WinXP command prompt trick involving the install CD to overwrite GRUB... thing is... GRUB is also the name of a lot of Boot-viruses, so... it might not be the grand unified boot-loader at all... See the confusion? Thankfully my rig, the one with all the 7800's has yet to be affected in quite that severe a manner... Time will tell if I am so lucky however. In the mean time, I remembered something else strange during my workaround... The second monitor goes grayscale at sub VGA resolution.

Its your psu.

Cheers

[TheSpearman]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

If I am not mistaken, I have a very sufficient power-supply and very sufficient cooling, on the affected computer even after ~15 hours of use, the ambient temperature never rises above 40...

If it's just a once off maybe you just got unlucky. Given the problems with nVidia drivers and dualcores, I hope you're not using any of the 8x.xx series of drivers.

[Painl3ss.NL]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

So to recap:
1. WinXP / Linux dual boot box reboots while playing bf2 and shows grub.
2. Another SLI box reboots while playing bf2.

You may have to different issues here. Rebooting and showing "GRUB".
Reboot can be anything maybe PB (as it's common to both boxes).
Showing "GRUB" may be because it is not setup correctly (anymore), did you update the version of grub in fedora ? or did you mess with your hd's ?

P.S. Grub runs after the bios startup is done, why do you think it has anything to do with your bios.

[greyknight]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

Well aware that GRUB runs after the BIOs, but.... "Possible problem with boot-loader/bizarre errors" is not as sexy as a sensationalist headline... I went yellow-journalist because I was tired, hung over, and confused... It's not a one-off thing, is the thing... Since the eve of January 27th this has happened to my machine at least, and I mean, at least three times... I'd love to say it was the PSU, but it's not. Moreover, I've been able to reproduce the error on my laptop. The odds that three computers would all have dodgey PSUs all at once... I mean, stranger things have happened, but... I have tested my PSU to ensure that it is outputting the necessary beef. To be even more clear, I use a UPS that logs any power spikes and it's been as flat as a dead-cat's ECG. Regarding Nvidia, drivers, I'm using something from the 7X.XX series, can't remember off hand/too lazy to check. Regarding my doomed associate... I am pretty sure that nothing there would bork the settings that hard. Well, I must thank you all for being so helpful... But, I swear if I get another "it's a dodgey PSU" post, I will slam my head against something hard.

[Jones[31stMEU]]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

Yea, BF2 may be evil sometimes, but not evil enough to destroy a freaking BIOS

[greyknight]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

Well, I know, I used to think that myself, and the BIOS part is sensationalist... I mean I do recall reading on some article about an SF beta that did the very same, I attributed that to bad translation, but... you never know. All I know is this is a reproduceable error on both Intel and AMD machines. I would be curious to know if someone with an ATI card out there has encountered this freaky error. I would love to say it was something corrupting the very way in which the windows XP bootloader worked, however that does not do anything to explain the crash before, let alone the fact that 1/2 of my monitors work thereafter yet the other is not to be ressurected without rebooting. I still want to blame the latest PB update that everyone else is saying destroyed their FPS as I have had issues with it as well, but the fact it can floor one computer, and do nasty things to at least two others... That is probably going too far. I remember reading over on PBF, some thread, can't find the link... about how numerous people would crash simultaneously regardless of where they were and a server-side issue was assumed, at least after lengthy discussion.... Even some rather paranoid people saying "Oh no string-overflow... HAX!" I know I'm going out on a limb here, but what if the up-**** was caused by some sort of server glitch?

[IntensivCareBear]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

ok, id like to verify that this is probably most definitely true.

2 friends of mine have already had the same problem, and im positively scared of playing BF2 in the worry that it might destroy my computer.

the thing that makes me most scared is the ones it happened to are way way more tech savvy than me.

[IntensivCareBear]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

hello?

should i try to play bf2?

[Viashimo]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

It is actually I who have had the problem (one of them) mentioned by grey_knight, until now I haven't been able to create my own account. Thanks for all the ideas guys, I'm now back on my desktop - it was neither temperature nor PSU, they are obvious problems to spot.

My fix to be honest, was quite quick... using a rescue disk for Fedora I managed to reinstall GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader), stuff works like a charm now.

Here's what bothers the hell out of me: the fact that a BF2 crash nerfed GRUB, because it's on a DIFFERENT partition that CAN'T currently be accessed by windows... weird, that or it is stored in part (though I strongly doubt it) on the BIOS, and somehow corrupted / destroyed files theres.

There propensity of a crash to destroy seemingly random inactive files normally inaccessible during use is greatly alarming. I cannot say whether it is BF2 or Punkbuster, or anythign else related to the game - I just know how to fix it.

For those of you who worry your asses off, it's not so bad, most people don't dual boot, and most people won't have a problem with this, but this is just an important reminder to keep a backup / RAID backup very handy in case stuff like this does happens.

This time it was fixable... when it becomes an irreversable problem, then... we'll know it's time to find ourselves a new game to frag on.

Cheers Guys!

[Painl3ss.NL]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

I've got a dual boot winXP / Gentoo Linux and the only time I had problems with grub was when it was updated and I didn't reinitialize it again.

Obviously I don't know what happened in your case, but maybe your grub setup was messed up before bf2 caused your box to reboot?

Anyway, doesn't really matter if it runs fine now. Just the idea of bf2 destroying your grub setup is kind of worrying, so I'ld like to see another explanation I guess ;-)

[[GU]LIZARD{GEN}]

Re: Did BF2 Destroy my BIOS?!

Things do go out for no reason.. It happens.. Even bios. BF2 may of been running and may of even caused the Mobo to over heat or the video card either way things do go out it happens. I doubt that Bf2 had a virus or it destroyed your Bios...