Fun that is, if you enjoy making up new profanity and cussing.
About in 2013 or maybe 2014 I built myself a computer for my home email, web browsing, and occasional Photoshop playing. i7 CPU, 32 gig of RAM and a mirrored pair of solid state 1 TB hard drives. It was plenty powerful for all my needs.
Then I started a business, doing aerial photography. Lots of monster large files, and heavy processor and memory use. My computer was just not up to the task. It was just to slow. I built my current i9 256 Gig of RAM and 18 TB RAID computer. It is wonderful, but I had a spare computer. Hmmmmmm
So I put 6 spinning hard drives in in it, and built a 36 TB RAID 5 server for my business partner's home office. It ran just fine for years, then nothing. No BIOS screen just the fans turn and nothing, not even a beep. Insert your preferred long string of profanity here.
It has 14 TB of current projects we have flown, and suddenly no access. It was our only copy of those projects.
My business partner brought it over, and said I need to heal it. Sure enough, I can't even get the BIOS screen. So first try was throw in a $100 video card. Then I still could not see BIOS, but I get to the Intel RAID screen and it said all the drives are happy. OK, cool.
I dug around on the internet and saw detective BIOS chip as a possible cause. Golly gosh darn it. So I took a $14 gamble and ordered a new BIOS chip from Bios depot. It arrived, and I was ready to install. Oh, golly that motherboard has a neat plastic cover over the top of the components.
It has cute little fans under the plastic to circulate air and keep the parts cool.
The BIOS chip is hidden under the cover, and the cover is bonded in place. Golly gee whiz, and dang. I started cutting a access port into the plastic, but that was going to take a few years.
I know where the BIOS chip is, just need access. Out to the garage, out comes the Dremel, and access hole magically appears.
Dig out my chip tool, and out comes the old chip, and in with the new.
It is a little chip, but without it, the computer is dead.
For those still reading and wondering what a BIOS chip is, it is the Basic Input Output Chip. It is the root of the way your computer is set up. Cheap little chip, and it is the interface for your computer to have access to the operating system. The new chip has the newest version of the BIOS on it and ready to go.
I built my first computer to run DOS 3.3 and a BBS system back in the stone ages of dial up. In all those years I have never had a BIOS chip fail all on it's own. So just a 14 buck chip cures the problem.