help! anyone flashed a gigabyte motherboard? or any experts?

[Cosmic_Horror]

hi all...

i just flashed a gigabyte motherboard (my sister's) and i carefully followed the instructions on the website.
Well all went well, expect that after the flash and you are to reboot the things doesn't!

Rebooting is the final step in the flash procedure, however i heard that there is a little jumper (CMOS) that needs to be cleared, ok.. i looked in the manual and can not find this jumper... tried taking out the battery for about 20min but that didn't help...

my sister is not impressed....
(it does giver her the excuse to upgrade but she is still not impressed!)

any help ideas is greatly apprecatied..

oh the motherboard is a GA-586TX with a AMD k6-200Mhz chip.

 

[AKA]

Okay? So what is the problem?

No video? What?

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

opps sorry..

it doesn't boot... as in nothing happens, (well the system powers on, cpu fan spins, normal noises emit, but they stop and the monitor goes in to standby mode...

 

[BFG10K]

Whew! I was just about to flash my motherboard a few weeks ago but I thought I'd better not.

When you tried to flash the BIOS, did the flasher give you a message like "the program's file part does not match with system"? If you got one you might have flashed the board with the wrong BIOS.

Do you have dual bios? If you do, when you restart press F1 (I think) and use your backup BIOS to overwrite the main BIOS.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

BFG10K

the bois revision was checked and and the lastest award flasher utility used as per gigabytes website.
the utility seemed to work correctly indicating a sucessful flash.

normally after a flash, there is a jumper on the motherboard that needs to be reset, this old motherboard doesn't seem to have this jumper.

the board unfortunately is too old to have the dual bios feature (this is a socket 7 motherboard, running a k6-200).

 

[Xcrown]

Cosmic, sometimes, its not a jumper where you remove a pin or set the pin. Its a jumper without the 2 pins. Youd have to take a wire or something, touch the two areas where the pins would be, and short it that way. Understand what Im trying to say?

Ideally, you shouldnt have to do even that. When you boot up, it should reset automatically for you. The fact that its not even posting would seem to show that either you flashed a VERY different bios (which you seem to indicate you didnt) or theres some other problem.

Ive flahsed wrong bioses before, and the machine would still boot....giving errors.

Xcrown

 

[AKA]

What is the model # of that motherboard? Did you back up your bios to another file on the floppy diskette? If you did, you could perform a blind flash back to the original bios.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

Xcrown

yep i understand what you mean, but in the motherboard manual it doesn't mention anything at all like that either...


A.K.A.

Yes part of the flash procedure we saved the old bios, and renamed it and it is still on disc...
but we can't boot to dos anyway

the motherboard is an old GA-586TX (socket 7 motherboard, about 4 oer so years old).

 

[AKA]

You probably can boot to DOS.. you just cant see it.
Put a startup disk in and see if you see the computer read the disk. If so then try to blind flash it back to the original bios.

Only way to do this is if you can remember each exact step, if not practice on another computer, or if you remember the instructions being exact you go by that.

Just remember to wait out each step to give plenty of time before performing next step.

 

[BFG10K]

Cosmic_Horror:

the bois revision was checked and and the lastest award flasher utility used as per gigabytes website.

Yeah I did that as well and I got that stupid error message "the program's file part does not match with system". At first I though I had accidently downloaded the wrong BIOS so I double checked. But I hadn't made a mistake.

Needless to say, I did not proceed with the flash! I don't know WTF is going on there.

XCrown:

Ideally, you shouldnt have to do even that. When you boot up, it should reset automatically for you.

So most modern motherboards will automatically reset when you when you flash them?

 

[Modus]

A.K.A,

<<You probably can boot to DOS.. you just cant see it. Put a startup disk in and see if you see the computer read the disk. If so then try to blind flash it back to the original bios.>>

Um. . . no. If the BIOS is toast, the computer won't start, simple as that. A bad BIOS isn't just &quot;keeping the screen black&quot; it's preventing the computer from beginning the most rudimentary of tasks.

Cosmic_Horror,

There are only three possible solutions:

1: Clear the CMOS and hope it was just a problem with corrupted settings due to the flash -- not likely, but worth a shot. Don't bother hunting for the jumper or the solder points if you can't find the manual and the board has lots of them. Just pop out the battery and wait about ten minutes. (Most batteries are shiny, flat and round, but sometimes, especialy on older boards, they're inside a black rectangular &quot;real time clock&quot; box. You'll have to open it up and pop it out.)

2: Find an old ISA video card and see if that lets you boot up. Some ISA video cards have their own BIOS which will sometimes allow you to boot a system and give you enough features to flash the BIOS back to an old version.

3: If you're really brave, do a hot swap on a working machine and flash the dead BIOS there. You'll have to be really careful and yank out the working BIOS chip while the good machine is running and replace it with the bad chip. Flash to an old version, replace the good chip, and replace the bad chip. Very risky and probably not worth it for an old board like that.

Don't even bother trying to order a new BIOS from Gigabyte: the board is so old that a similar one could be found at a swap meet for about $10. Probably the best course is just to call it fate asking you for an upgrade

Modus

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

thanks all for the advice.. i have ordered in new parts for my sister... she said it was time to upgrade anyway..

oh just to let you know i have ordered in a duron 800Mhz, MSI kt7 Pro2 -A and she also needs a atx case...

so she will be happy.

 

[AKA]

Modus,

You dont know what your talking about! Ive done several blind flashes on mothers boards where the bios was flashed wrong. And about out of 5 I think it didnt work maybe 1 time. Not all wrongly flashed bios completely kill them, as anyone here who has done them can atest to.

 

[Modus]

A.K.A,

<<You dont know what your talking about! Ive done several blind flashes on mothers boards where the bios was flashed wrong. And about out of 5 I think it didnt work maybe 1 time. Not all wrongly flashed bios completely kill them, as anyone here who has done them can atest to.>>

I find that extremely difficult to believe. What you're basically saying is that 80% of bad BIOS flashes will in fact only corrupt the portion of the BIOS code that handles video display, leaving everything else intact. Malarky.

There a million BIOS elements that could get corrupted in a bad flash -- BIOS checksum code, POST routines, chipset registers, memory timings, too many others to list -- and video display is just one small bit of code among many. Are you honestly saying that four out of five botched BIOS flashes will only corrupt this one specific section of BIOS code? Give me a break.

Modus

 

[AKA]

Millions? Good god, what a joke! Besides the set basic there are only hundreds.


Cosmic_Horror, if you still have that motherboard, I would be glad to fix it for free. Email me if interested.

 

[Modus]

Millions is a figure of speech, Professor. And by your own admition, there are hundreds of identifiable routines in typical BIOS code. Yet you still claim that, 80% of the time, a bad BIOS flash only affects the video display code? Please.

<< Cosmic_Horror, if you still have that motherboard, I would be glad to fix it for free. >>

I think he'd prefer Dr. A. K. A. Kevorkian stay quite far from his motherboard

Modus