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.
That is true today but wasn't always back then. My Dell T130 (which I still use today) would not output DVI until you connected a VGA input to flip it to DVI.