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Updated BIOS...

S

Sqube

Diamond Member
Specs:
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Processor: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester)
1024 MB (2x512) Corsair Value RAM
2x250 Seagate Barracuda hard drives (S-ATA)


I think that's everything relevant; if you all need more information, let me know. Anyway, here's what happened:

I had the F2 version of the BIOS for my motherboard. I went to Gigabyte's website and checked to see if they had a newer BIOS, and they were up the F7 revision, so I figured that it wouldn't be a bad idea to update it, particularly since the F6 revision included support for dual core processors and that was a route that I'm seriously considering. But I digress.

I got to this page and clicked on the link that says "How to reflash M/B BIOS?" which takes you here.

Of the three options available, I chose the second one which does a live update. I downloaded it fine, it installed perfectly, it identified my motherboard properly, ran correctly, yada yada yada. I rebooted the computer and then it won't post properly anymore.

It does the RAM thing just fine, but never gets to the point where it identifies the hard drives. Instead, it jumps to a screen that asks me to hit F10 to enter the RAID utility (which gets a big wtf from me). After this point, I get a little hazy on the details, but it jumps to another screen, checks to see if there's a floppy in the drive (I put in the floppy with a backup of the F2 BIOS in here, but it just says to remove all media and hit any key to restart), and then says "Boot from CD/DVD". The first time, I didn't have a CD in there so it did a search for something related to the MAC. When it didn't find whatever the hell it was looking for, it said it was exiting the program that had just come up. If you need the specifics of what's happening at this point, I can post those, too.

Also, let me say at this point that the check for the physical MAC address didn't happen every time.

With the motherboard came a CD that claimed, among other things, to have some sort of BIOS utility. When I put this CD in the drive, the computer reads it fine, but then says that there's an error because there are no hard drives installed.

Let me also say at this point that, as far as I was able to ascertain, there is no way to change the BIOS from within the BIOS itself.


That's my tale of woe. If anyone can offer any kind of assistance, I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I'm using another computer that's at my house so I'll be able to implement any suggestions fairly quickly.


Thanks in advance for any and all help.
 
Go into the BIOS's boot menu and pound it into the mobo's head that "hey foo', boot from my SATA drives and no one gets hurt :evil: " The boot-device order evidently got reset to factory defaults and it's trying to boot from the network as a last resort (that's where the MAC thingie is coming into the picture).

So go through your BIOS and set up the boot-device order.
 
turn off your computer, then clear your CMOS (read your motherboard manual on how to)
then turn on computer, enter the BIOS and set it to optimized settings or fail safe settings.

if that doesn't work try going into BIOS, setting your boot priority to HD first, save, exit
if that doesn't work try reflashing mobo bios using floppy drive method (describe on your mobo site)
 
mechBgon and yourdeardaniel, thanks for the help.

However, something interesting that I've noticed is that the computer categorically ignored any changes I made in the boot order of the BIOS. It didn't matter what I put first in the boot order; the computer simply ignored it. It checks the RAM, it checks IDE drives... and then jumps without ever taking a look at the S-ATA drives.

I think that has something to do with my problem, but I'm at a loss as to how to fix it. I tried going into the BIOS and checking the boot order. I took out the CMOS battery and enabled the Optimized Settings option (that's the closest I could find to a "Default Settings" option).

Reflashing the BIOS using the straight floppy disk method doesn't work because... the computer never gets around to checking the floppy during the initial boot process.

Assistance still required!
 
Umm... anybody? A little help here? This is kind of a big problem that I'm having a hard time solving.
 
Originally posted by: Sqube
Umm... anybody? A little help here? This is kind of a big problem that I'm having a hard time solving.
Click to expand...
Some mobos have a two-stage boot-device menu. In one menu, you specify the order (HDD first, CD-ROM next, floppy third, or whatever) and in another, you tell it what you actually mean by "HDD."

For example, on my A8N-E, I can specify HDD first, but then I have to go to a separate menu and say "oh, and by HDD, I mean the Cheetah 15k.3 at SCSI bus 1, ID0, not the ATA/100 drive." By default my mobo goes first for ATA/100 drives if the BIOS gets reset to defaults.

I will download the manual for your board so I can see what sort of BIOS they use on it and maybe get more ideas.

 
Originally posted by: The Pentium Guy
Don't gigabyte motherboards have a 2nd bios for backup?
Click to expand...

I imagine the swankier ones do; when I was putting this machine together, I decided to budget less money to the motherboard than I should have, making this pretty much the best choice at the time.

It's treated me pretty nicely, all things being equal. This whole BIOS upgrade though... it's been a fiasco thus far.

mechBgon, I'll try digging into the BIOS a little bit deeper and seeing if I can't find an option that tells the computer to identify the S-ATA drives as boot drives.
 
Here's what I found: 8KNF-9 manual, page 36 and the first item in Advanced BIOS Features is the one I was thinking of, Hard Disk Boot Priority.

Any good? 😕


edit: also, on page 37 there is the IDE/SATA RAID Function. Presumably you were not running RAID, so make sure that's still set to Disabled, as well as all the following RAID options, such as SATA1 Primary RAID and so forth.
 
mechBgon, I've gone into the boot priority and, no matter what changes are made, it does the exact same thing.

However, I was not aware of that information on page 37. All of the SATA RAID Function stuff is Enabled, and I didn't think there was a problem with this since I am, in fact, using SATA hard drives. I'll go ahead and disable all of that stuff now, to see what Disabling all of those functions will do.

yourdeardaniel, if mechBgon's suggestion doesn't work, I'll go ahead and see if I can't get the F2 revision of the BIOS and revert back to that.
 
Originally posted by: Sqube
Specs:
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Processor: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester)
1024 MB (2x512) Corsair Value RAM
2x250 Seagate Barracuda hard drives (S-ATA)
Click to expand...
Were you running the 2 Seagate drives in a Raid array? If so raid0, raid1? If not, were you just booting off of one, and using the 2nd for extra storage? Obviously after the flash your PC is having trouble finding a bootable hd.
 
WebDude, I'm not running RAID at all; it's JBOD with one disk for storage and one disk that I install everything on.

I'm off to turn of all that RAID stuff in the BIOS to see what happens. Wish me luck!
 
Update:

Thanks to mechBgon, yourdeardaniel and WebDude for all of your help. The problem was that I had the RAID functions enabled in the BIOS. I made sure the S-ATA stuff was enabled and the RAID stuff wasn't, and I'm now posting this from my computer.

Thank you all so much for your help!
 
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