Flashing the BIOS help Please

[farmercal]

Okay let me first appologize for asking such a basic question but I have never done this before and I have heard of people screwing up their motherboard when the process went bad.

I have a Shuttle AK35GT/GTRV1 motherboard. There is a problem with the sound drivers even though I have the most current XP sound drivers. I have the original BIOS and noticed that the second BIOS update on the web site fixed that problem (there are four updates).

First: If I get the latest update, it does fix all previous problems, right?

Second: When I go to do the update, it offers me the option to "open" or "save" the program (which is an executable program). Do I open it or do I save it to my hard drive, get off-line and open it from the hard drive? Does flashing the BIOS mean that I have to open it online and let it do everything from the site?

As I said before, I have never done this before and just don't want to hose my motherboard because other than the sound problem it is a good board.

Thanks,

Cal

 

[ThisIsMatt]

Since no one helped ya earlier...

The newest bios should fix everything the previous ones fixed.

That board uses an award bios if I'm not mistaken. You download aflash.exe and the bios image (or they may be zipped together, I don't know). Put both of them on a win9x boot floppy (might want to delete some of the junk off the disk to make space in case you want to save your old bios image to the disk).

With the boot disk, boot to the a:\> prompt (no cdrom support, etc). Run aflash, you can save your old bios image if you want to, then it will ask you to type in the name of the bios image you want to flash with -- it'll then tell you the old one and the new one and what motherboard it's for so you can verify it's correct and then ask if you want to proceed. You select yes and it with erase and then write the bios. Make sure not to shut off the computer during this process.

 

[farmercal]

Thanks ThisIsMatt, I just don't want to screw my board up to where it doesn't work at all.