New BIOS 1010 for A7N8X-E crashed my system!

[Rivergoat]

Has anyone had the latest BIOS cause a blue screen crash at startup?
Typical crash consistent with drive not compatible with BIOS. One
shouldn't have to reformat a drive just to update BIOS, cripes, I
never had to in the past!

Only fix was find another drive, format it, throw an OS on it and load
the utility to send the BIOS back to 1008. Then my normal drive booted
fine.

Who's nuts here? Me or ASUS????

 

[dino]

if you had used AWD.Flash and saved the old BIOS (this means using a
formatted floppy)..it would have taken 5 minutes to restore the previous
version. Did you flash in Win using the Asus update tool?

 

[Rivergoat]

I used the ASUS update that comes on the CD. I tried accessing AWD
(which I'll admit I'm not familiar with, I have just upgraded from an
old PII ASUS board). I saw the "enter AWD" message at POST but
pressing the keys listed didn't seem to do anything anyway. If it does
as you say that's exactly what I was thinking would be necessary, a
boot floppy with a way to restore the old BIOS. I'll try to look into
AWD and see why it didn't load, or what. Still, is it , uh, "normal"
for a BIOS update to cause Win2K to fail? I've mostly flashed 98
machines and never had that kind of problem....

 

[Ben Pope]

Has anyone had the latest BIOS cause a blue screen crash at startup?

Err... whats blue screening? Thats generally a Windows thing.

Typical crash consistent with drive not compatible with BIOS.

Drive incompatibilities should be pretty rare, and a failed drive should not
crash the BIOS under any circumstances.

One
shouldn't have to reformat a drive just to update BIOS, cripes, I
never had to in the past!

Whats wrong with your floppy? (oo-err.. )

Ben

 

[Rivergoat]

What's a blue screen? Yeah, and I'm sure Bill Gates sits at his desk
with his Macintosh laughing at us *

Turns out nothing is wrong with my floppy, it was the keyboard. This
isn't a new keyboard and the F2 button wasn't working. I brought in
another keyboard and tested, sure enough worked fine, so I would have
been able to get to the AWD Flash utility at POST had the key combo
been working. Figures....

Spent over an hour and a half talking to ASUS tech support today.
Actually a good guy and quite helpful, although he didn't have any
definite fixes to some glitches. We both sat at systems and compared
MS Knowledgebase articles, as well as kicking around scenarios. He
said there's not been any other reports thus far on BIOS 1010 being a
problem. Could be I got corrupted d/l, could be vampires for all I
know. Either way we agreed I don't really need to try it again as 1010
is basically a memory thing, not to do with other glitches I have. He
did say some day a whole new BIOS, not just a revision could be
released, there are some better BIOS in use.

I'm going to consume alcohol now....

 

[Natéag]

With BIOS 1008, I had no problem.
When I flashed the BIOS with 1010, and my computer
almost evrything went fine at first.
But the CPU speed was set at 133 by default.

When I changed it to 166 (333 MHz processor),
I got a warning "Failed because of overclock".
Rebooted, had trouble getting in the BIOS (at least nothing
would appear on the screen). After a few attempts
the BIOS display appeared, but my keyboard
wasnot working, so nothing doing. It turned out the
processor was fried. I won't try another one with
that BIOS for fear of frying another one. Guess
I will have to order a new BIOS,
Using my old mother board for the time being,
with new processor.

 

[Jose M. Arnesto]

Has anyone had the latest BIOS cause a blue screen crash at startup?
Typical crash consistent with drive not compatible with BIOS. One
shouldn't have to reformat a drive just to update BIOS, cripes, I
never had to in the past!

Only fix was find another drive, format it, throw an OS on it and load
the utility to send the BIOS back to 1008. Then my normal drive booted
fine.

Who's nuts here? Me or ASUS????

Asus is. I have also had trouble with v1010 and had to go back
to v1008. The first time I booted after updating the BIOS my Windows
hanged. I went into the BIOS settings only to discover that you could
no longer manually edit the memory timings the way you could in v1008
(who thought of changing that???)

Then I flashed back to v1008. Of course, that was not the end,
as after that the computer would no longer post. I had to disassemble
it and reset the BIOS settings (removing battery, changing jumper,
etc...)

It seems Asus quality has gone South. This is the second Asus
motherboard I have owned (the first one was a P3B-F and it was simply
great) and surely the last one too.

Kind regards.