KN1 Extreme BIOS flash

[dirkoneill]

I would like to apologize from the beginning if I am lacking some details. This happened to me last Thursday and I am posting from memory.

Last Thursday I received my new ECS KN1 extreme motherboard and an athlon 64 3000 CPU. After assembly and installation, everything seems good except for 2 major problems.

The first was apparent right away and it continues to baffle me. For the past two years I have not used a PS2 keyboard with a windows machine. I have always used my old USB keyboard from my apple B&W g3 tower and an IBM USB optical mouse. This has worked on every windows machine that I have built/used until this one. When I first turned the computer on, there was a menu option that asked if I wanted to continue with start up or press delete to configure the bios. I thought that I should leave the bios alone until I had at least started to test things in windows. So I press enter to continue (keep in mind the keyboard responds) and I am booting into the windows xp installer. As soon as the first install menu comes up I notice the optical mouse is not lit up and there is no response from the keyboard. I unplug and plug it in a couple of times and there is nothing. So I restart the computer to try again and the computer actually hangs on the kn1 extreme splash screen. You can imagine my frustration that my brand new setup has frozen. So I press restart again and it boots into the install cd. Once again the mouse was lit up and then once the first menu comes up it is dark and the keyboard doesn't respond. I have used the keyboard and mouse with other installations so I know it's not a windows driver issue. Anyway I borrow my roommate?s ps2 keyboard and I get everything installed and I boot into windows xp. Once again at the login screen though, the USB keyboard does not respond. So I restart and the computer hangs. It turns out that the computer will only hand on startup if the USB keyboard is plugged in. After plugging and unplugging the USB keyboard at least 10 times I can finally get windows to recognize it and it is usable. Also, installed ubuntu and it right away recognized the keyboard and it worked for the rest of the install. So the USB ports aren't bad and it's not a windows driver issue so it must be a bios bug. Although that confuses me a little bit because the keyboard does always work if the "continue or enter setup" menu is present.

After reading a few reviews it was apparent that the shipping BIOS (1.0c) had a few bugs and I should flash to the latest version (1.1a). I've never flashed a bios before so I was a little worried about doing it. My first step was to backup the current bios. I used the winflash utility from the ecs site and loaded up the latest bios. It flashed the boot section as well as the main memory (Boot section was automatically selected). On restart all I got was beeping. Luckily they provided the flash top hat and I was able to boot up and get back to the flashing utility. I tried flashing back my backup but winflash said the backup file was invalid. What crappy software. SO my only other option was to step down to the only other release (1.0f) and hope that worked. I flashed main and boot sections, restarted and was greeted by that beep again. Man I was pissed. Luckily I thought to boot back up and take a rom dump of the flash hat using the NVIDIA nTune software and use that. Thank god that worked and my computer was usable again.

So I was wondering if anyone else has had a problem flashing the KN1 extreme BIOS and has anyone else ever has such a problem with a USB keyboard?

I am going everything again tonight but I have some new theories. First for the keyboard. The bios has an option to enable USB keyboards and mice so that they work in old programs like dos. I think there could be an error with that so I?m hoping that if I turn it off that might go away. AS far as the bios is concerned, I feel like I shouldn't have flashed the boot section and I should never use winflash again. So tonight, since I know how to recover from a bad flash now, I will use nTune to flash only the main memory section of the bios. Does anyone with BIOS experience think that this sounds like a solid plan? Anyway I hope this goes a lot better tonight.

 

[Peter]

I have flashed this board model more than once. Winflash is pure evil though - use the DOS flasher next time. I haven't used USB keyboards on this board, but I know you should indeed ENABLE "USB legacy keyboard" support for smooth operation of such an item.

 

[dirkoneill]

well the dos utility worked but the motherboard still beeps so i guess the bios isn't correct. And to really top things off, I just managed to overwrite the top hat flash too. Awesome. Any ideas?

 

[beast464]

Did you ever get it to work? I just got this over the weekend and got an AMD X2. I wanted to update to 1.1a since it has dual core support. But it just gave the "can't find RAM" long beeps. I did the top hat flash and went to 1.0f, but I'd really like to have support for my processor.

 

[dirkoneill]

Consider yourself lucky that you got 1.0f to work. I couldn't even get that. I used nTune, winFlash, and their provided DOS utility. All I got after each attempt is the ram beeps. Unfortunatly on my last attempt, I pressed the enter button, looked down, crap. The flash hat was still on the BIOS chip. So now i have no way to recover and I am presently dealing with ECS on getting a new chip.

I don't know what is up with their bios images. I think they are corrupt. Because when i took a backup of the image from my flashhat bios, that flashed correctly. I do find it interesting that you could get the 1.0f to work. What revision of the KN1 extreme do you have?

Just so you and some others know what I am going through with ECS for a new chip I will elaborate. So far I am unimpressed. Do not fill out their online forums. They take days to even get an automated response back to you and it is much easier to call tech support(ecsusa.com) and speak to a human. Once i did get through, the tech was very helpfull and sent me an email that contained all of the information that i needed. Unfortuanly he only told me that i needed to contact the rms department about buying the new BIOS chip. Amazingly, the bios chip seems to be the only thing they charge for. Other things are free + shipping and handleing. So the rms department is impossible to speak to in person. I am always told to leave a message. Although i do hope that if i did leave a message i would get a call back. anyway, So after numerous emails, they sent me the cost($18) and I am to pay them by PAYPAL! I for one canot personally believe that a company as large as ECS is only taking paypall payments. Maybe I am just frustrated by the whole experience and there is a good reason for only paypal but i don't know.

Anyway, as sweet as the board could be this whole thing sucks. I feel for you, especially since you have a dual core chip, but i am relieved that I am not the only one having BIOS flashing problems. I wanted to flash because of bugs in the 1.0c bios and i canot believe that such a buggy bios was actually shipped. If i were you I would try to return your board and get either the MSI ultra4 board or one of the two editors choise award winners in anandtechs recent ultra4 board shootout. I am on the brink of ordering the msi and either talking to newegg about returning the ECS or just eating cost of it.

Keep us informed about your ordeals.

 

[beast464]

My new Corsair twinx memory came today so I will see if that works. If not then I may try it with just one mem stick in. A guy tried that when he couldn't get his asus to flash. Will keep you updated.

 

[dirkoneill]

I didn't think that it could be bad ram because my system worked fine with the kingsten value ram that I initially purchased. Could it be that the ram was not up to par? I can't believe that being an acceptable answer since a bios update should not change the ram requirements if it was working before. If that is the case, I still think that's ECS's fault in programming the BIOS. I sent my board back to newegg and i order the msi neo4 platnium. Let me know how it goes.

 

[beast464]

After doing some more research I realized that I forgot to check clear CMOS. After that it reflashed. Good luck with the MSI.