My company recently had these two 980 machines returned from offsite and in the process of reimaging and updating the first one, I ran the A15 BIOS update and lost the NIC card. It doesn't even show up in the BIOS anymore (meaning no Network menu item where I can change it from disabled/enabled/enabled w/pxe, etc). Also, it flashs "NIC Failure" shortly after the BIOS screen. Once windows boots, it sees an Intel 82xxx LC network card but is unable to start it.

What is odd is the other machine, running the A02 BIOS shows the NIC as an Intel 82xxx DM Network card. Did the A15 BIOS update the NIC firmware with an incorrect firmware file? The NIC card worked fine on the first for installing windows, installing all updated drivers, installing all windows updates, etc. Then I did the A15 update and bye bye NIC card.

What I've tried:

Going back to A02, no joy. I then did BIOS updates from A01 through A15 (yes, it took some time), still no joy and NIC Failure messages on each BIOS level. I've tried backing up the A02 BIOS on the working machine but no utilities could accomplish this without some sort of error, so no way I was going to flash the resulting ROM into the broken one. Short of buying a new motherboard...is there anything else I can try?