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bios upgrade question on asus a7v133

B

broadwayblue

Golden Member
my a7v133 has been running stable for over a month now without crashing one time. however, the bios is an outdated version 1001c. Should I upgrade it to the latest version (1005 i believe)? I would like to start tweaking my system a little bit and thought upgrading the bios might be a good place to start. I have never upgraded a bios before so I'm a little bit nervous about messing with it. Should I do the upgrade? Thanks.
 
Broadway,

before you upgrade your BIOS, save your current file on a floppy. If the new BIOS boofs everything for you, you can allways revert back to the old one that worked. ASUS is pretty good at delivering new BIOS's that work.
 
thanks...got the file. stupid question: how do i back up the bios? i searched all my drives and couldn't find it. guess i need to go read the mb manual.
 
broadwayblue,

If you found it on your hard drive, I would be worried 🙂

You need to boot into real DOS and run a BIOS flash utility. This will write the BIOS into a file on the hard drive. More details are available in the manual.
 
go to bootdisk.com and download the floppy image called "floppy for bios flash" or something like that. Execute that file with a formatted floppy disk in the drive. This will write a bootable floppy. Put Aflash.exe and the relevant bios file on floppy. Reboot. Make sure youe boot order is set to boot from floppy before the HD. It will boot you to dos prompt.
a:\
Now type aflash
It will ask whether you want to flash to new bios or save the current bios. You can save your current bios first. After saving, choose the "flash to new bios" option. You will be prompt for the bios file name. Type that. You have to answer "yes" a couple of times. Then it will start writing.
DON'T TURN OFF YOUR PC DURING IT IS FLASHING.
After it is done, it will say that. Shut down the PC after that and then restart.
 
not exactly the encouraging words i was looking for...hope you can fix it soon.

in one of the threads i read someone reccommended flashing the bios twice in a row to make sure it takes with no errors. is that a good idea? also he talked about shorting two soldering points to clear the cmos...do i need to do that? thanks again for all the info.
 
Flashing a few times just ensures that all the previous information has been cleared out. You shouldn't have to do that.

As for clearing the CMOS, it's not really that hard to do.

There are two soldering points next to the CMOS battery. All you have to do is unplug your computer and touch the two points with a flathead screwdriver for 5+ seconds.

My friend updates his A7V bios on a regular basis but he told me he never cleared the CMOS.


You have to make sure you follow all the important steps to upgrade your bios or else you risk ruining your system. I can't even get to system POST screen. Just black.
 
Main points you should keep in mind:

> Write down your system board revision number and your current bios version.
> Turn off virus protection and byte merge and make sure bios update is enabled.
> Save your current bios to a file first write down the name you give it. Like 1004.awd
> If the bios upgrade fails don't turn your computer off! Go back to the main menu of aflash.exe and load the file you saved (1004.awd)

If you can wait a few days to upgrade your bios, and have $25 to spare, you might want to check out this neat product: http://www.ioss.com.tw/eg/

It lets you store your bios and have backups if anything goes wrong. It might be worth looking into getting one of these. They can save you a lot of hassle (and money for that matter!)


Once you get around to upgrading, print out all the information you've gathered and keep it by your side.
 
Gusfo0
One guy on E-bay is selling A7V133 bios chip for $20. You might be able to revive your mobo.
 
If you use the ATA100 IDE controller for your hard drive(s) you won't be able to access them when you boot into DOS. You should either keep a spare formatted floppy or switch your hard drives over to the default IDE controller.

Don't want to write your old bios to the floppy and have the disk run out of space.
 
it's probably better to go for 1005 then 1004. had lots and lots and lots of problems with 1004! however 1005 works out great.
after flashing the bios (which isn't such a big deal; i don't understand how you can blow anything that simple - how difficult is it NOT to touch the reset button while flashing? buttonfreak perhaps?) you should enter the bios and load the setup defaults and then change the settings you want to change....
 
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