A7N8X-D & bios v1007

[T1025]

I've read this forum for quite some time now and know there are a lot of
experienced ASUS users out there who might be able to help me. I had an
A7N8X-D v1.04 running very well and stable, even with my Athlon 3200+
@400FSB. Unfortunately, my bios/MB locked up when saving CMOS and I could
not get it to post. Sadly, I RMA'd it back to ASUS but my mood returned to
joy when I received a v2 board back!

I put the new v2 board back in my PC and it ran very stable with the same
performance as before (I expected this as I had the CMOS parameters
to what I had before. To be safe, I then reloaded Win XP and while I was at
it, I updated my configuration to run a raid 0 array with the v1007 bios. I
had read that the v1007 bios ran well with the 3000-3200 XP's.

After everything was reloaded and working, I've found that my HDD
performance with raid 0 doubled, however, my Sandra CPU scores were off by
about 5%. 3DMark2001SE also crashes almost every time back to the desktop
and I get random BSD every few days or so (memtest86 runs successful so I
know it's not memory issues). Also, I get Win XP "The system has recovered
froma serious error" pop up boxes immediately after booting up from time to
time (but not immediately before or after the BSD's). After running for
about a week, I've come to the conclusion that bios v1007 is not for me, so
I'd like to go back to v1006 which was on the v2 board when I received it
from ASUS.

Question is - can I somehow keep the updated SATA bios in v1007 (4.2.27) and
go back to v1006 of the A7N8X-D bios? Any advise would be much appreciated.

Tom

 

[T1025]

I've also included below more info on my configuration - I have not
overclocked it in any way.

ASUS A7N8X Deluxe V2; Bios v1007
3200+ Athlon XP Barton core 400Mhz FSB
2 x 256meg Kingston PC3200 Memory - running at 400Mhz
CPU Heatsink - Thermaltake Silent Boost w/AS3
CPU temp (S-Diode) - 41C no load/49C load
Antec Performance Plus1080AMG case
430watt TruePower Power Supply
2 x 120meg Maxtor SATA HDD configured as RAID 0 (boot drive)
200meg Maxtor ATA133 HDD
Sony DRU-500A DVD/CD Burner
3.5" FDD
6-in-1 Apacer internal memory card reader
ATI Radeon 7500 video card (I'm not a gamer)
WIN XP w/SP1 & all the latest updates/patches


Tom

 

[Ben Pope]

Question is - can I somehow keep the updated SATA bios in v1007 (4.2.27)
and go back to v1006 of the A7N8X-D bios? Any advise would be much
appreciated.

Right... a shall now unleash my FAQ for the first time (having just added
this question to it):
www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html#SATA_Update

Ben

 

[T1025]

Thanx Ben, this is exactly what I needed! I'll give this a try and post
back. While what you are proposing seems reasonable, quite frankly, I'm not
looking forward to being the first to try this as I've already hosed up my
bios once and had to RMA my MB. I don't think ASUS woud RMA it again ;-)

If anybody else tries this, pls let me know how it works out

Regards,
Tom

 

[Ben Pope]

Thanx Ben, this is exactly what I needed! I'll give this a try and post
back. While what you are proposing seems reasonable, quite frankly, I'm
not looking forward to being the first to try this as I've already hosed
up my bios once and had to RMA my MB. I don't think ASUS woud RMA it
again ;-)

The method works. I have tried it myself and so have others... the only bit
that I have not tried is removing the EPA logo to gain space, but that
shouldn't cause any problems.

I was running with a SATA Enhanced 1006 using that method.

Of course... If you break your system using my method, thats your problem


Ben

 

[T1025]

Ben,

I've created a new bios based off of v1006 with the 4.2.27 SATA bios.
Believe it or not, the newer SATA bios in v1007 is smaller in size than the
SATA bios contained in v1006 so 4.2.27 fits into v1006 without any further
adjustments.

This may be a silly question, but it appears that 4.2.27 was added to the
end of the modified v1006 bios instead of inserting it into where the old
SATA bios was - is this a problem? I'm not sure if the order of the
individual items withinthe bin file is important.

Thanx for all of your assistance - your website is great!

Tom

 

[Ben Pope]

Ben,

I've created a new bios based off of v1006 with the 4.2.27 SATA bios.
Believe it or not, the newer SATA bios in v1007 is smaller in size than
the SATA bios contained in v1006 so 4.2.27 fits into v1006 without any
further adjustments.

Yeah I beleive that! The uncompressed image will be the same size, but
compressed... it could go wither way. The 4.2.12 was larger than the
4.2.50, so the SATA Enhanced 1006 I made required that something be removed.

This may be a silly question, but it appears that 4.2.27 was added to the
end of the modified v1006 bios instead of inserting it into where the old
SATA bios was - is this a problem? I'm not sure if the order of the
individual items withinthe bin file is important.

Thats exactly what I experienced, and it's fine. What will happen is that
there'll be a table with the offset (address) of each of the option BIOSes
A, so when you update the BIOS and the order of the components change, CBROM
automatically updates that table and it still works. (it might not work
quite like that, but you get the idea)

Thanx for all of your assistance - your website is great!

No probs, thanks.

Ben

 

[Ben Pope]

The 4.2.12 was larger than the 4.2.50

That was supposed to read:

The 4.2.12 was larger than the 4.1.50

Ben

 

[T1025]

Well, as an intermediate step, I flashed back to bios v1006 and my system
has returned to running very stable. In trying to image my boot drive
before flashing, I kept getting BSOD 5-10 minutes into copying the image
from my SATA raid 0 boot drive to my PATA spare disk (it's about a 60 gig
image file). This did not make me feel very comfortable regarding the
latest SATA driver v10032 & firmware v4.2.27.

Bios v1006 w/SATA v4.1.50 is running very smoothly now - even with large
file transfers. I'm thinking I'm going to stay where I'm at for now.

Tom

 

[Ben Pope]

Well, as an intermediate step, I flashed back to bios v1006 and my system
has returned to running very stable. In trying to image my boot drive
before flashing, I kept getting BSOD 5-10 minutes into copying the image
from my SATA raid 0 boot drive to my PATA spare disk (it's about a 60 gig
image file). This did not make me feel very comfortable regarding the
latest SATA driver v10032 & firmware v4.2.27.

I don't think there's anything inherantly wrong with 4.2.27 and large
tranfers, nor 4.2.12. At least, not with my Raptor - I'm not using RAID
though.

Bios v1006 w/SATA v4.1.50 is running very smoothly now - even with large
file transfers. I'm thinking I'm going to stay where I'm at for now.

I don't think you're missing much to be honest, but 4.2.12 has been out
quite some time now. It'd be nice to see a changelog...

Ben