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ASUS has been making technological devices for decades, and its four founders already had prior experience working at Acer. Since its inception, the company has grown to make products that range from phones to computer parts, although it is perhaps known best for the different laptops and desktops you can buy.
Like any computer, ASUS models will have a BIOS. The BIOS firmware provides operations that help a computer boot, run its startup processes, and make sure everything functions in a proper sequence. Sometimes, users might need to get into the BIOS to check things or make changes.
We can discuss some reasons why you might not be able to access the BIOS on an ASUS computer. Further, we’ll go over how you might force the issue on the motherboard itself, what to do if you can’t get into the BIOS via the normal means, and what you should do if you can’t seem to access this part of the system at all.Table of Contents
How Do I Force BIOS on an ASUS Motherboard?
Perhaps the easiest and most effective way to access BIOS on an ASUS motherboard is to use a specific combination of keys that are designated for that purpose.
1. If your computer is running already, you’ll need to restart it in order to get into the BIOS.
2. During the restart, you’ll have a limited window in which you can use key combinations to get to different screens that will show you different settings on the computer. For BIOS modes on most motherboards, this will be either the F2 or Delete keys, with the latter usually showing up as ’Del’ on your keyboard.
3. This configuration can vary by manufacturer or motherboard model, but the ’Del’ key is the most common one for entering the BIOS on modern ASUS boards.
4. In most cases, you should only need to press the appropriate key once at startup while the computer is going through POST. If this does not work, you can also try tapping the key a few times.
How Can I Enter BIOS if the F2 Key Is Not Working ASUS?
Perhaps you’ve pressed the appropriate key once, multiple times, or been through several restarts to get into BIOS. If this doesn’t work, the first thing to consider is that you might be pressing the wrong key.
The ‘Delete’ key seems common for ASUS products, but F2 is also an option. If neither of these works out for you, it may be best to check which key you need. Your manufacturer should have this information.
It could be difficult to determine which key you need to press if you don’t know what type of motherboard you have. However, you can look in the manual for your computer to determine this. If you don’t have the manual available, there should be a similar one online that you can view.
Failing that, just looking for the general specs of your computer model online could also lead you to which configuration you have for your motherboard, and you can get the appropriate key from there.
Even so, if the keys are not working as intended, you may need to consider the possibility that the keyboard is the issue. If you have a dedicated keyboard, you can try restarting your system to see if that solves the problem.
For this part of the test, we will assume that you know which motherboard you have and that you know which key you need to press to enter BIOS settings for ASUS.
Sometimes, things can fail to load properly once your operating system starts. This failure can cause keyboards or other things to become unresponsive when you try to use them. Even if the keyboard does seem fine in most other respects when you are doing other tasks, a simple restart is easy to do, and it could fix the issue of the BIOS key not working.
Similarly, if you have a USB keyboard instead, try using a different port to see if it is more responsive. Again, you can do this even if the board appears to be working normally in other cases.
With a USB keyboard, you should not need to restart the whole system for the changes to take effect.
If this still does not work, you can consider going into Windows ‘Device Manager’ and disabling the drivers for the keyboard. Follow this up by re-enabling them, then restart the system and try to get into the BIOS settings normally.
What To Do If You Can’t Get Into ASUS BIOS?
For this part, we will assume that the keyboard is functioning normally. The keys function as they should, including the option to use the key your motherboard has set to get into BIOS on boot. For some reason, you still can’t get into BIOS on your ASUS computer.
There could be a few reasons for this, and there is one fix you can try that might eliminate all these issues. Depending on the motherboard you have, a quick boot option may be enabled.
As the name suggests, this kind of boot happens so fast that the system cannot recognize that you are pressing the key to get into BIOS, and this is true even if it is the correct key.
If quick boot is the issue, one of the few things you can try is resetting the BIOS. Doing this should disable the quick boot feature and allow you to get in there and see what settings you might want to adjust manually.
Resetting the BIOS will usually involve clearing the CMOS, which is a semiconductor that helps your computer keep track of some important things. It does this using a battery on the board itself. That way, it can keep some information current even when the machine is turned off or completely unplugged. One of the things it keeps track of is your BIOS and its settings.
Depending on the make and model of your computer and its board, you may have a button for resetting the CMOS. This is not common to all motherboards, and it is found most typically on new boards at the higher end of the quality spectrum.
To check yours, look for a button near the rear of the IO shield near the USB ports. If it is not there, it could be on the motherboard itself, and you’ll have to go inside the case of the computer.
If neither of these turns out to be true, you can still reset the CMOS by turning off the computer, unplugging it, and taking out the CMOS battery.
After you have done all this and put everything back together, try booting up the computer normally. Use the appropriate key to get into the BIOS now. You can make the changes you need to make, note down relevant information, or even enable the quick boot feature again, if you like.
How Do I Reset an ASUS BIOS Password?
Ordinarily, the BIOS shouldn’t need a password for you to get into it. However, you can opt to set a password yourself.
To do this, you would need to get into the BIOS using one of the methods we’ve discussed above. Once inside, you’d look for a ‘Security Options’ menu. From there, you would want to access the ‘Administrator’ profile. It is here that you can set a password to be able to access your BIOS.
If you have done this in the past and forgotten the password, you’ll have to reset to get back into your BIOS.
Using the information above, you could clear the CMOS to accomplish this, but it is a bit of a workaround. Further, if the board has the BIOS password stored on its own chip rather than saved in the CMOS settings, this method may not work.
If you can get into the computer’s menus, though, you can perform a reset or restore from your operating system. This should accomplish the same thing, and it should allow you to change the password to your BIOS.
However, because of their nature, BIOS passwords are not meant to be reset easily. Therefore, we need to use complete resets of the whole system or other workarounds.
Failing anything else, you could try to go for a completely new, clean install of your whole operating system. However, we recommend this course only as a last resort.
Conclusion
As with any manufacturer of computers, the BIOS on ASUS products contains special menus for various settings that you might tweak. You should be able to access it with a simple key press, but that key can vary from one model to the next.
If you are having any issues with accessing your own ASUS BIOS through the normal channels, you can use some of the methods here to see if you can get into the system that way.