This is a story on how I managed to boot a headless rig when the mobo had entered into the BIOS.
My one month new MSI RX 5700 Mech GP Edition decided to quit on me this morning
. I could not get it undead.
I suspect maybe memory got damaged by heat - I found it was impossible to mine with it and keep the hot spot temperature under 100 degrees while mining ETH. I watched a Youtube vid on that same card where they found the thermal pads did not cover the mem chips.
I took the GPU out of the rig, then faced a new problem: How to boot the now headless rig back into Windows without a GPU since the Ryzen 3700X CPU in it doesnt have a built in GPU to drive the display. The mobo I have is an ASUS TUF 450M.
I know the mobo usually enters into the BIOS after a hardware change. I was not able to RDP into it from my laptop.
After a lot of trials with reboots and new keyboard sequences I found the correct key sequence to get it to exit BIOS and boot into Windows. Immediately after power-on, I hit the Delete key and held it down for a few seconds until I was confident it was now in the BIOS. I then pressed F10 and Y to confirm. And then it booted into Windows.
The rig is now cpu-mining Monero while waiting for a GPU replacement. I will have to RMA that defective GPU.