My poor poor Ezmeralda!

To start this off I need to clarify that my daughter used my computer for home school. She evidently downloaded and installed some very very bad things that ultimately bricked my Crosshair IV Formula motherboard. I don't have any way of resetting the bios back to stock to get it to post so, kaput.

Now my conundrum is, do I just grab something halfways decent, or do I go for the current generation of awesome for my AM3+ socket? I would feel kinda weird buying a badass mobo for my aging Phenom II X6 1090T even though it still accomplishes everything I need it to perfectly well and I don't see a reason to go to anything better.

I thought you could change the bios by using a USB stick and pushing a button on the rear I/O? Or is that bricked as well?

The problem is it won't post at all. There is nothing there to tell it how to use any of the mobo resources. I suppose I could probably send it to ASUS and get them to reflash the bios but I would be better off spending the money on a new mobo to begin with.

If you remove the BIOS battery, it should clear the BIOS, once all the power is properly drained from the board.

maybe the board died? its an old one...

are there any leds light up? or fan spinning?

bios chip http://www.ebay.com/itm/BIOS-CHIP-ASUS-CROSSHAIR-IV-FORMULA-/260726427936

if that's really the problem

remove the battery and unplug the power supply, press the power button and reinsert the battery, there is also button or jumper for clearing bios/CMOS, all of these does not require the motherboard to actually  post

She would have needed to download a new BIOS and flashed it in order to "brick" your motherboard. 

You probably shouldnt blame her, because Ive never heard of any mainstream viruses doing such a thing. 

It probably just died on its own. Or from lack of care.