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I am new to linux and have recently installed and have ubuntu 13.10 working. Something weird is going on though. Back when I first got my aw17 I was all into benchmarking and I flashed my vbios and that caused me to have this splash screen at startup even before the bios. Well I had to completely repartition and restore my hard drive and now this is happening, it must have been saved in the restore somehow. I figured it would be erased after the new OS. Anyone mind helping me read through my boot log to find this and remove it please! I will post any results to instructions asap.

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  • Please add screenshots (links to them). Somebody will edit your question and paste them as pictures. Then it will be more convenient to help.
    – Danatela
    Mar 19, 2014 at 3:55
  • Check in your BIOS settings, there is usually a "show splash screen" option. Mar 19, 2014 at 4:00
  • If you see a splash screen before the BIOS, this has nothing to do with the OS. The OS is loaded by the boot loader after the BIOS posts and cannot affect anything you see before.
    – terdon
    Mar 19, 2014 at 4:13

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By vbios, I take it to mean your video bios. The video bios exists on a chip on your video/graphics adapter much in the same way that your Motherboard's bios is stored on a chip. Both your video bios and motherboard bios are read and executed every time at boot. You could have multiple and different OS's or no OS at all, but the bios still executes. It's what gives your system its basic functionality (and is responsible for letting you know when there are problems with your system, like when there is no OS installed, for example) and what eventually loads your chosen OS after all the hardware checks out.

Specifically, your video bios sets up the complicated components that make up your video card. It contains things like clock speeds, fan settings, operating modes, capabilities, and even the model information. It does mostly all the same things your motherboard bios does, but only for the video card and its components.

So all the long-windedness aside, all I'm trying to say is that all of your bioses are indepenent of any OS you choose to install. Whenever you flash one, it's permanent (until you flash it again). Adding/removing hard drives, wiping your OS, etc will not change your bioses.

A video bios can contain a splash screen. Most don't because they are annoying and usually introduce a delay in your boot process to give the user time to "admire the artwork". But after booting the same PC the first 100 times, the effect starts to wear off. And then, to top it off, you still have to sit through your motherboard's bios splash screen (if enabled, of course). (After all, we wouldn't want the thousands of dollars the company who made the card spent on making a 64-128kB image which is pixelated and an eyesore to go to waste).

And generally, the vbios is not user-configurable in any way. So you likely would not be able to turn of the video splash even if you wanted to. (And why would you? That art is phan-see!)

So here's what you can do: However you managed to flash your vbios, do it again. But this time, use a different version. Maybe the original one that was on it? A good practice is to make a backup of the original bios before you go flashing a new one. So I'm hoping you have one stashed somewhere. Different versions of a vbios you choose to use may have the splash feature disabled.

Bonus: This chip's architecture is of a kind that is called Complimentary Metal-Oxide Silicon or CMOS. Does CMOS sound familiar? The name comes from the manufacturing processes and techniques that went into making it.

Also, nowadays, with modern OS's anyways, many video card vendors are writing unified drivers for their products. Part of the advancements made with this driver model is that the driver should have more direct control over the hardware. Thus the vbios has been rendered impotent as it's really only used during boot and the driver loaded in the OS handles all of the configuration that vbioses handled previously. So in most situations, flashing your vbios does not gain you much of anything unless your card has secret cuda or shader cores that a hacked vbios can enable. Heck, even video card vendors have stopped releasing vbios updates, as they are all but useless anymore.

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