Can't Boot into BIOS

cereberus said:

OP - have you removed the CMOS battery for a while as that is sometimes the only way to get to bios as I said earlier?

Note:- some devices no longer have a removable CMOS battery now which makes life trickier.

No, and honestly I have no intention of messing with the CMOS battery. I might update the BIOS as that might give me some overall benefit, but I have no interest in resetting the BIOS by removing the battery.

Thanks, essenbee, yeah I tried a version of that, but I could never get the BIOS splash screen to appear. I think it's more about the BIOS splash screen not appearing for some reason than not being able to boot into BIOS. I'm guessing I've successfully gone to BIOS, but just can't see the screen (my monitors are all black). As mentioned before, someone in the MSI forum mentioned some problems with multiple monitors, and having to connect only the DVI monitor to see the BIOS screen. Though I tried that and that didn't work either.

By the way, as I mentioned in my first post, after I built this thing every time I booted up it would first show the MSI BIOS splash screen before going to Windows. Annoying. But there was a BIOS option as I recall to turn that off, which I did. I'm starting to think that maybe this is related. Maybe it NEVER shows the BIOS splash screen, even when you specifically boot into BIOS. Though that would be kinda strange, why would they do that?

Okay, well problem solved...

On a hunch, I guessed that maybe my problem was related to my graphics cards and monitors, and for some reason the POST messages and BIOS screen weren't being displayed. I normally have all 3 monitors connected to my GTX-1070 GPU HDMI, Displayport, and DVI connectors. So I tried removing all but the DVI and re-starting. No joy.

Next I moved my DVI monitor to my other GPU, a GTX-1080ti, and unplugged the other two monitors, and....

VOILA !!! Suddenly the BIOS screen appeared in my DVI monitor. So then I moved all 3 monitors to the 1080ti, and everything works great. BIOS splash screen appears for a bit, then boots into Windows.

Don't ask me why it made a difference, I have no clue. It just works. Go figure.

Thanks all for the excellent help. I really appreciate you guys going to so much effort to help out.

And after all that, I finally made it into the BIOS, looked around, and said "Nah, I don't need to change anything", and exited.

Geesh..