BIOS backup takes long

[Wald]

Hey guys,

I'm planning to flash the BIOS on an older system to overcome the 2Gb limit
it has for hard drives. I'm not too familiar with this, so a making a BIOS
backup first seems like a pretty good idea.

It's an Award bios on a Soltek SL-54P5 motherboard, I have a boot disk with
awdflash and an appropriate .bin on it. However, making a backup with
"awdflash a:\biosbak.bin /sy /pn" seems to take quite some time. After ten
minutes, it still doesn't seem to have done anything. After a reset, I find
a "biosbak.bin" file on the diskette, but it's empty. Is this normal?

Thanks,
Wald

 

[Jan Alter]

I've done at least 20 flashes on various boards. The backup portion (when
I've done it) doesn't usually take more than a minute or two. The whole
process takes less than 3 - 4 minutes. Let me suggest making a new startup
disk and recopying the awardflash file (or even downloading it from the mb
maker's website ) and adding the new bin file to the disk. Read the
directions for flashing and follow them verbatim. And no, there really
should be a backup file sitting on the disk when all is done.
Good luck

 

[WebWalker]

Bad floppy disk, maybe.

 

[BruceM]

I've done several secessful flashes & only once has the option popped up to
give me the option to back the old one up.
I don't worry about it at all. Be confident that it'll work & if it doesn't
they usually have details how to recover from "bad flash".

 

[wald]

<snip>

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. The basic problem boiled down to
an "Unknown flash type" error. I was using v8.18 of awdflash.exe, I
switched to v7.90 and this one *was* able to flash the BIOS
correctly with the same .bin file.

Thanks for the help.

Wald