All said and done, I feel that the @bios is an awesome tool, provided it's used properly. I'm posting the e-mail transcript between myself and the Gigabyte technician for the benefit of others using @bios: (pls ignore the technician's typos
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>1. There's a checkbox called "Clear DMI Data Pool". Do I have to select the checkbox?
>>>> DMI is also known as desktop management initiave, which is relate to the DTMF(desktop managment fourm) this data containg such stuff as how much memour is in your system, who is the M/B or OEM that made this M/B in to a system stuff like that. Clear just clears it. Somtime clearing it will not allow you to boot on the next reboot, leave it as is.
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>2. What is the "Clear PnP Data Pool" setting? Should I also select this?
>>>> In CMOS there is a space to store PNP date that space is somtimes called the ESCD
this is where data about your PnP device are stored. leave it as is. if you want to clear it you can usually do so in CMOS under the PnP/PCI menu. the option is called something like reset ESCD data
>3. What is the recovery procedure if anything goes wrong? Like clearing
>the CMOS by jumper? or copying a file to a floppy called AMIBOOT.ROM??
>>>> there is really no standard recovery feature on our M/B some of them have it most don't.
in the AMI work you do have to change the name of the rom file from say 7ixe.ff to amiboot.rom and if the recovery feature is there that should work. on Award you probably have to chnage the file name to someting like 7ixe.bin to get it to work if the M/B has that feature.
the only way you can tell if your M/B has this featue is after you killed your BIOS and even then it's an iffy thing. after you kill your BIOS try to boot and see if the floppy drive light comes and as seems if it''s being accessed. If it does then you stand a chance of donig a recovery.
depention on how the recovery method is implemented in BIOS will determine how it is suspposed to work. Basicly you have to poke and hope that one of these methods work.
Tha AMI BIOS revovery method is shown but should be the same for the Award BIOS if it is present.
Make a disk with the BIOS file renamed to AMIBOOT.ROM
Make a Boot disk with the BIOS file renamed AMIBOOT.ROM
Make a Boot disk with the BIOS filed (say 7ixe.fx) being called from an autoexec.bat file. The autoexec.bat should contain something like flashxx 7ixe.fx.
basicly you place one of these floppies in to the floppy drive at power up and hopefully one of them will work. You may or may not see any display. like "insert recovery floppy", "recovery started" "command.com missing" Etc.
The actualy recovey may take a long time like say 5 min so if it seem to be reading the floppy let it sit for a while before you try the next floppy.
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>4. After updating thru @Bios, I'll have to restart the PC. After the
>restart, do I have to enter the bios and "Load Setup Defaults" for
>changes to take place? Also any other things to do after restart?
>>>>
yes you must alway load BIOS defaults. I do it each time I load an OS or upgrade BIOS.
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>5. Before running the utility, it's better if I disable all other
>programs including anti-virus scanners, right? Also better to load the
>setup defaults before running @bios?
>>>> it's probably best to disable all anti-virus and firewalls while you're upgrading.
not necessary to setup defaults before running @bios, unless you just upgraded it.
IE. you just flashed to ver F1 and now without loading BIOS defaults your at the desktop and you want to flash to BIOS ver F2. I would have loaded BIOS defaults right after I flahsed to F1. <<<<
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