Bricked an old Via Epia 5000 Mirra

[paredown]

Thought I would start here. This was a backup server sold by Seagate under the Mirra name that was a locked box--no keyboard access etc, with some other bios mods. I tried to follow this thread:
http://eurowonka.blogspot.com/2009/03/re...mirra.html

No floppy support; I did modify the hard drive per the above thread and was able to clear the bios password--but some features will still disabled, including the USB ports. Although I could get it to boot on the reformated HD, I could not run the awdflash software--it would come back with errors...

I burned a bootable CD (from Bootdisk), added the bios file and Awdflash--but could not get the AWD*exe to respond--even a simple query seemed to hang. I then tried the same procedure, using the maker's own updater

The bios update appeared to complete (using the Via updater, since I could not get the Award version to find the bios), but on reboot I saw this message once:

AWARD BOOTBLOCK v1.0
Copyright © 2000, Award Software, Inc.

BIOS ROM CHECKSUM ERROR

Detecting IDE ATAPI device …
Found CDROM, try to Boot from it…

Since that message (and I tried to put the CD I booted from back in)--I get a series of beeps (three?) and a double tone (sort of a oh-oh that goes down a tone). Tried reclearing the CMOS but nothing...

Any ideas about recovery?