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Need to update bios on a k7s5a, any advice?

I

IceGod

Member
When I tried to install W2k it said my BIOS doesn't have ACPI support, and that I should get a new BIOS. I've heard of people having issues updating the bios on this mobo, is there anything I need to worry about? I've never had problems updating a BIOS before, but I'm always nervous to do it 😛 Thanks for any tips.

Tom
 
I'm trying to update the bios for this board too. Although it is working fine for me and I'm kinda hesistant to flash it, but I always want to the most up to date bios on my boards. I'm still trying to decide if I should do the overclockable bios, but I think I'll start off with the ecs one. Too bad their site sucks and I only get like 800 bytes/sec of transfer. It took me 30 minutes just to download the dumb flash utility.

If anyone has any advice on this I'd also much appreciate it.
 
I set up my new K7S5A last night, it came with 08/27/01 bios, I flashed it to the newest official ECS bios (9/20/01) with no problems. I booted off a Win98 startup disk, copied the .rom file and flash utility to one of my hard disks, and ran the flasher from there. Seemed to take a long time but it finally rebooted and everything seems to be working fine!

BTW, I did the BIOS flash before installing Win2k SP2

Note: I was getting a very slow download rate (under 1k/sec) from the ECS Taiwan site (www.ecs.com.tw) so I used the US site (www.ecsusa.com) and it was much faster (as fast as my 56k connection could go heh)
 
I find the easiest way for me to flash a Bios is to extract the flash utility and bin file to a floppy disk first. Then simply boot up with a Windows startup disk and wait until it is loaded in your RAM and sitting at the A prompt. Just put in your other floppy and type in the appropriate flash command, update or awdflash or whatever. This works whether or not you have an OS loaded.
 
Whatever you do, don't unzip the BIOS file onto the floppy using Win2K or WinXP on your K7S5A motherboard. I think the majority of dead BIOS have been attributed to a corrupt floppy writes under those 2 OS's. The newest BIOS' have a new setting that enables Win2K floppy compatibility. If you have a separate system, create the BIOS floppy using that system. If you're running Win9X or WinME on your K7S5A, you can create the BIOS floppy fine too.
 


<< try this link, it has all the BIOS and utilities and most questions answered
ocworkbench ECSk7s5a FAQ
 >>



Bump for the OCWorkbench FAQ link. VAFOX and DEFENDER are rewriting the whole FAQ and have split BIOS into its own FAQ. Check it out, it's got all the details.

I did Shift-F5 during boot and flashed the official 010920 from my hard drive. No probs. Whew!

EDIT: Before attempting to flash, don't forget to create a BIOS recovery disk (xxxxxxx.rom renamed to AMIBOOT.ROM on full format floppy) just in case. Details also in the FAQ.
 
Bootable CD-ROM for bios flashes!!!! Use nero and an image file. Google will assist you with instructions and proceedure.
 
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