Hi All,
I did a very stupid thing tonight. I wanted to upgrade my CPU from an
Athlon 850 to a Athlon 1.3GHz on a A7V (PC133/VC133). The BIOS I was
running was 1007 and I wanted to upgrade to the latest: 1011. I'm
running XP Pro and I created a boot floppy. I booted to the floppy
and I flashed the EPROM with the revision "successfully". But, when I
restarted the system, I got nothing! Have I destroyed the BIOS chip?
If so, can it be replaced? If you're going to scold me for this,
bring it on! I deserve it for making such a bonehead move. I should
have done this with a true DOS boot floopy right?
TIA
If the disk booted and offered a command line that you could
type the command into, I don't see that it matters. As long
as you had a DOS prompt, that probably wasn't the problem.
Sometimes, the version of flash program you use can make a
difference. I don't see any warnings on the A7V download page,
so there is nothing there to go by. I also didn't see anything
on a7vtroubleshooting.com for this board and BIOS.
You can try the "clear the CMOS" procedure, in case the problem
is a mismatch in data structures. Unplug the computer before
doing the procedure, to prevent damage to the motherboard.
What are your options ? I have two lists, things that seldom
or never work, and the rest.
1) Boot block recovery. The BIOS has two sections, and if the
boot block is still intact, in theory you can use a PCI video
card, or no video card, to boot from a floppy and try flashing
again. Apparently, the boot block doesn't support AGP video,
so it is a PCI video card or nothing. In the case of no video
card installed during the recovery attempt, the DOS floppy
needs an autoexec file with a one line call to the flasher
program. This is fine if the flasher program has a
non-interactive mode of operation, but not all Asus provided
flashers can do this. As to whether this is worth pursuing,
try pulling the video card, insert your vanilla DOS floppy,
and see if the motherboard tries to access the floppy. If it
doesn't go near the floppy when you turn on the power, then
forget it. (Clear CMOS before trying this, to give it the
best chance of working.) It is possible you could try
the "uniflash" program someone hacked, but check to see if
anyone has used it on your board before or not. But if the
board won't access the floppy, move on.
2) Hot flash. Pull the flash chip from its socket and find
another motherboard that has the same kind of flash chip. It
doesn't have to be the exact same model of board, but the
chip pinout and flash type should match (hard if you don't
know how to look up chip info). Plug the duff chip into an
_already running_ motherboard, by pulling its BIOS chip out
_with the power on_. Use your flasher program to flash the
duff chip, then shut down the donor motherboard. Sound
scary ? - it is. While some guys have done tons of these...
3) Find someone with an EEPROM programmer. (Yeah, right.)
Now to the practical list
4) badflash.com Buy your way out of trouble. Pull the duff
flash chip, and replace with a freshly programmed one.
Asus also apparently sells BIOS chips, so talk to Tech
Support concerning a phone number and contact name for the
service.
4a) BIOS Savior (ioss.com.tw) Like badflash, this gadget has
a BIOS flash chip on it. There are at least four different
models, and you have to select the right one for the job.
Check with the vendor who sells these, to see if they can
program the Savior with an A7V BIOS for you - if the vendor
doesn't offer a programming service for the Savior, then
the Savior is useless without at least one working BIOS
image on the board. A BIOS Savior is typically purchased
_before_ you attempt to flash, so a duplicate of the good
image on the board can be made first. So, while this is
fun to play with and good to have, (4) is more likely
to directly and immediately solve the problem.
HTH,
Paul
