Clay Daniels:
I should have been more patient, but I used flashrom to attempt to install a bios update from MSI, and it kept looping through the attempt giving an error message about "unable to erase". I eventually got the pid # with top, and killed the job. Everything seemed OK, so it was late and I shut the computer down with the normal Ubuntu shutdown. The next day, it would not boot. By not boot, the fan & lights came on, I thought I heard hard drives, but absolutely no video. I messed with it for several days, then ordered a new motherboard. After installing the new mb, hopefully correctly, I have the same problem. I can't think of anything left undone. Is it possible a failed flash can fry the video card? I re-used memory, etc, but the monitor shows no activity.
Seems unlikely to be video card, but if you've swapped out the motherboard there's not much other flash left. What internal programmer did flashrom say it was using? If it maps to something onboard vs. the video card, seems even less likely...