Did you flash the bios ... or just destroyed completely the ROM chip ? I don't think 486 boards from this era were able to flash bioses. Only the latest ones can do this and it's not by just moving jumpers.

Even if it's dead, you can still replace it with a brand new chip. However you'll have to flash it obviously. You can either use an USB flasher or something like that or a pentium 1 or 2 motherboard that uses the same kind of bios chip and that can flash it.

All you'll need is the rom file (I know, you're looking for it at the moment) and a program called "uniflash" that can basically flash any rom file to any motherboard. You'll have to boot the pentium 1 or 2 motherboard with it's original bios chip.

Once it's on, take off the original bios chip and put in the right orientation the ROM chip you want to flash, then start uniflash, select the rom file you want to flash and then start flashing ^^ when it's done, put the newly flashed chip in your 486 and put the original bios chip of the pentium 1 or 2 motherboard back in place

Pretty sure it is flashed from the jumper switch. When I boot up the machine I get "Flash memory boot block Version F 1.1" and then under that is wants me to insert either a 1.2M or 1.44M disk so I think it is wanting a new Bios to load. The jumper was next to a chip in a ?socket? that says Flash on it. Sorry this thing is 15 years older than the first computer I ever built.

If you flashed the BIOS I'm pretty sure it would'nt display anything. To me it asks a bios setup floppy (maybe you erased the CMOS settings by mistake). Some computers did this. However I never saw this myself. There are probably people knowing more about this.

Anyways, don't trash it as it's still working since it displays something ^^

Ok so I identified the motherboard. It is a Micronics DXLB (P/N 09-00144). I found the ROM file here http://files.mpoli.fi/hardware/ROM/OTHER/ and it is in a .exe.

Put that file on a floppy image using my Gotek floppy emulator,load the floppy image and pressed "Q" for 1.44M disk option, then "reading floppy disk" flashes, screen goes black, comes up a second later, then the same screen pops back up with the only difference is that it shows "flash memory update is done".

I have never dealt with the bios before so I guess what I really need is some information from someone who knows this era of computers on what to do to get my bios up and running again. 😢

That EXE contains a compressed disk image, you can't just copy the EXE file onto the disk. You need to run the EXE on a working (DOS or Win9x) computer and it will write the image to a disk, then you use that disk it created to flash the BIOS.

Maybe DOSBox can do this though

Running cmd in a machine with WindowsXP opened the EXE which extracted several files one of which described how to create a boot floppy. Had to create an actual floppy but it worked perfectly. Thank you all so much!

WinRAR and 7zip can extract those kinds of EXEs usually... you can also try in cmd expand filename.exe