Need help flashing bios of AsusA7A266 MB

[Sulik2]

I am trying to walk my brother thorough over the phone how to flash his bios and the asus live update is not working. The program says "fails to verify EEPROM with new bios image." It says that he has EONENT9F002NT-ROM right now. I've never seen EONROM before so what is it and how do I flash his bios. If it has to be done with a disk anyone got a good walkthrough for it.

 

[mechBgon]

Sure,

1) get the DR-DOS boot-floppy-making utility from Bootdisk.com, and make a boot disk with it.

2) download the BIOS-update utility for the A7A266 from here. It's a straight A7A266, and not an A7A266-E, is that correct? Extract the actual BIOS out of the Zip file that you downloaded, and put it on the boot floppy.

3) also download the aflash221.zip flashing utility, extract it from its Zip file, and put it on the floppy.

4) boot the computer from the boot floppy and when it reaches the A: prompt, type aflash.exe and it'll ask if you want to save the old BIOS, then it'll have you type the name of the new BIOS and it'll flash it.

Hope that helps

 

[Sulik2]

Ok before asking for help on this forum we tried the auto update thing from asus and it didn't work as I posted, however I think it did flash the bios because after he tuned it off last night nothing turns on today. He can hear power come on and then the screen stays black. We went ahead and tried the boot disk, but that didn't work either, computer never registered it. So I think we fried the bios. Do we need to order a new bios chip and install it know, or is there a way to recover.

 

[mechBgon]

One option is to get a new chip from http://www.badflash.com. You can tell them what BIOS you want pre-loaded on the chip and they'll do it.

But in the bigger picture, you're trying to bring back to life a really outdated, underperforming board, and that money might be better spent on a nice Shuttle AN35N Ultra, as long as the power supply is equipped with an ATX12V cable like the Shuttle needs. One other thing to watch, you would need an AGP 4X card. Old 3.3-volt AGP2X cards are Bad News? for modern mobos :Q

Also, you would need to reinstall Windows, because the Shuttle uses the nForce2 chipset instead of the ALi Magik. But you'll gain USB 2.0, higher performance clock-for-clock, support for every SocketA CPU out there, good overclocking capabilities, and AGP 8X for what that's worth. All for ~$54. Could be something to think about