Truly , One for the Pro's!!

[Nih]

Ok , I'm staring at the Award bootlock on bootup (for the hundredth time), It's looking for floppy media and i'm twiddling my thumbs. How can i salvage this board/bios?? Answer this questions and i'll call you sir for a week.

 

[Brig]

This is really a looong shot, but are the fdd cables and connectors ok ?

 

[hominid skull]

Try resetting the bios, take out the battery for five minutes and the bios should default to factory presets.

it would help if i could spell...

 

[Deckard]

What happens to the floppy drive when you try to boot? Does the access light come on? Have you put a bootable floppy in the drive to see if that makes a difference? Did you remember to supply power to the floppy? Sometimes something simple like that may be overlooked...

Good luck

 

[Motorheader]

I've only seen this with certain ASUS boards and a improper flash. Also some AOPEN boards. You have one chance and one only to rectify this yourself. You have to unplug the computer, find the bios reset jumper, clear CMOS, or something named that on your board. Move the jumper for a moment, move it back to the original spot, plug in the box, and cross your fingers. If the bios resets, your system will be back to all default settings, but you will be able to reset everything - time, ports, drives, date, etc. If this doesn't work, you are pretty much at the mercy of some place like this:

www.midcocomputers.com

They will reflash your chip, or send you a new chipped flashed.

 

[Nih]

Motorhead, or should i say Sir Motorhead .. ahem... Exactly. It is pretty much always caused by a bad flash, but i still have a question. I can clear the cmos all i want, that doesn't help. But the bios reset jumper, I've never come across that yet, I'll look for it in the future for sure. Thx all for your help.

 

[Motorheader]

Nih

What point are you at - for sake of curiosity?

 

[Nih]

ok sir motorhead.... I've got the board out of the box, Just posting it with cpu hs/fan, ram and video... I've attatched a floppy ,(since it is searching for media). I have a bootable bios flash floppy in the fdd, Just in case it decides to recognize it. I know the problem here is most likely because of either a bad flash , or a corrupted bios rom. The board will not get past the bootblock(award). I don't think it knows it's a mobo anymore !! lol Any other ideas , i'm ready to give in and accept it is going to need a new bios rom..

 

[Damaged]

How To "Hot Flash" your BIOS.

Last resort. Scroll down the page to Q9.

 

[Motorheader]

Make a bootable floppy disk with an autoexec.bat file. Also on that floppy you should have the .exe file for the flash and the actual .bin file that you want to flash the system with. In the autoexec.bat file, you should have one line that will go along the lines as such:

*.exe *.bin /?? /?? /?? or something along those lines.

The /?? are the switches that most award flash utilities have in them. Because you are dead in the water right now, you are going to have to find out what switches will allow you to automatically flash without interaction, reset the bios, clear the bios, and update the bios.

I have only had the way outlined by Damaged work one time. Who made the board? Is the bios chip soldered to the board, a little .75 inch square in a socket, or a .75 x 1.5 inch block in a socket on the board? If if is soldered, you are basically hosed. I have updated/flashed about 1000 system boards. With the advent of the programmable flash via software, I've seen quite a few botched ones, and I have had 3 recommended updates not work, only to find that the manufacturer knew there may be an issue with that flash, but didn't outline/acknowledge it until after a few people contacted them.

AOpen will have you send back the whole board, Abit will usually send you out a new chip - but they are a real bear to get to follow throgh. Each manufacturer has their own way of handling (or not handling) the bios issue. Tyan is one of very very few that will deal directly with the end-user as a standard part of their support.

Good luck and LMK

 

[Nih]

The hot flash really seems to be a last resort, Possibly a fix , possibly 2 boards in need of rma... But i'm going to try it anyway lol... The switches on the flash disk are: /py/cc/cp/cd/sn..... they are respectively. Program new bios,, Clear Cmos,, Clear Pnp,, Clear Dmi,, Save old bios NO..

 

[Nih]

BTW , Thanks for the link on hotflashing.

 

[Motorheader]

Make sure the half moon notch goes the same from one to the other i.e. make sure that though they are different, the chip goes into the good board lined up the same way. I had a friend cook one trying this in a Dell box - put the chip in backwards - cooked it in less than 5 seconds.

Ahh that burning smell of modern technology.

LMK

motorheader

 

[Nih]

Will do ,, thx