The default BIOS settings of that era had a lot of bad defaults necessary for backwards compatibility. For example, this particular board defaults to “native IDE” instead of AHCI, which absolutely wrecks HDD speed.
The thing is that no matter what the bios settings are you should see bios come up. Otherwise you would not even be able to make settings changes. Now if someone flashed the bios to do an update and that update did not complete then your motherboard would be a paper weight.
I did see one brand a while back that could recover from that by having a backup copy of the bios in hardware. But that is not the normal thing.