P5AD2 Premium fails to get to bios after change

[Ben]

My PC has been working for several months without problem, running a P4
3.4 GHz on a P5AD2 Premium. However, I had problems recognizing sound
in Linux and the bootup/bios would always report the memory as PC 4300
-- however, it's actually PC 5400. Today I went back to the bios and
renabled the sound, setting it to HD Audio (from disabled), and
manually changed the memory timings to 3 3 3 instead of 4 4 4 (the
original manual setting). After saving and exiting, it gets to the
point where it should give the bios info but dumps with an error
message (I don't have it here with me) along the lines of a "corrupt
bios", and it continually searches the A: drive and cdrom drive for
P5AD2P.ROM. It seems impossible to get past that point because it
believes the bios is corrupt.

I'm wondering what steps I could take to restore the bios short of
ordering a new/replacement bios chip? I don't find any P5AD2P.ROM on
the asus website, just their standard *.AMI for bios upgrades.

Thanks for your advice,

-Ben

 

[Robert Hancock]

My PC has been working for several months without problem, running a P4
3.4 GHz on a P5AD2 Premium. However, I had problems recognizing sound
in Linux and the bootup/bios would always report the memory as PC 4300
-- however, it's actually PC 5400. Today I went back to the bios and
renabled the sound, setting it to HD Audio (from disabled), and
manually changed the memory timings to 3 3 3 instead of 4 4 4 (the
original manual setting). After saving and exiting, it gets to the
point where it should give the bios info but dumps with an error
message (I don't have it here with me) along the lines of a "corrupt
bios", and it continually searches the A: drive and cdrom drive for
P5AD2P.ROM. It seems impossible to get past that point because it
believes the bios is corrupt.

I'm wondering what steps I could take to restore the bios short of
ordering a new/replacement bios chip? I don't find any P5AD2P.ROM on
the asus website, just their standard *.AMI for bios upgrades.

Thanks for your advice,

-Ben

Did you try resetting the CMOS with the jumper? It may just be getting
screwed up because of the RAM timings.

If that doesn't work, it wants a CD with a BIOS image of that name. The
support CD that came with the board should work, if not you can likely
just take a downloaded BIOS image for the board and rename it to that..

 

[Ben]

Did you try resetting the CMOS with the jumper? It may just be getting
screwed up because of the RAM timings.

I assumed too much from the error message and didn't try a hard reset
(shut down and reboot). When I came back to the computer this morning,
every thing worked like a charm except that it complained about
overclocking failed and that I should reset the values.

I'm still curious why the bios reports the memory as PC 4300?

Thanks for the advice, those were the things I planned on trying.

-Ben