I think I killed my A7A266 Motherboard ... Please Help!

[geckojohn]

In order to support a faster Athlon processor, I tried flashing my motherboard to the latest update last night. After I was done flashing the motherboard, my system wouldn't boot. It didn't make any beeps... and it didn't show anything on my monitor. It would just power up and nothing would happen.

Just to let you know, I have an Athlon 1.4 with 256MB ddr memory. I tested all of my parts at work this morning and they all seem to work, except for the motherboard. Is there anything I can do to salvage my motherboard? Can I re-flash it back to it's previous state? I made a backup of my old bios file... Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm really short on cash right now and don't have the funds to purchase a new motherboard. Thank you.

 

[CSMOOTH]

I am no expert on the subject but you can flash the bios back to the old version if you can get it to boot from the dos disk.

Here is some info from Sudhian that might help:
If your BIOS appeared to flash properly, then you had one good reboot, but all subsequent reboots have left you with a blank screen, you most likely failed to use your one chance to reset the CPU speed from the default 500 MHz back to the proper clock setting. This results in a machine that won't go. You need to clear the CMOS and then immediately enter SoftMenuIII in the BIOS and set the correct CPU speed.

Otherwise, you have probably somehow corrupted your BIOS whilst flashing to the later version. One user also found that this problem was due to having too many fans connected to his machine. If you are lucky, the boot-block BIOS will remain, which means you may be able to reflash your BIOS using a bootable floppy. Your screen may remain dead during this activity, and so you might have to guess when the process is finished (wait 5-10 minutes). Note that if you use a PCI graphics card rather than an AGP card you may not experience this blank screen problem. To reflash the BIOS you must do the following:

Create a bootable DOS floppy
Remove all memory management files from the floppy disk and AUTOEXEC.BAT
Download a new version of the BIOS file and copy to the floppy disk (don't use the version which killed your BIOS - it's probably corrupted!)

This info was for the specific board that was broken:
Download a new version of the AWDFLASH.EXE file and copy to the floppy disk
Add the line "AWDFLASH newbios.bin /py /cc /sn /cd" to the end of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file (where newbios.bin is the name of new BIOS file)
Power off your machine, insert the floppy, power up
After five-ten minutes, remove floppy and reboot!
Good luck! To prevent these problems in the future you may wish to consider using a BIOS Savior (available from Eksit Data).

 

[Telinar]

If you can't reflash your Bios, just buy another ROM chip from ASUS. E-mail them to see if they sell some for your A7A266. You can just replace the Rom chip you don't have to buy a new MB.