Benützer: arximidisxeno |
History of a failed BIOS update For some reason I wanted to update the BIOS of my computer, which has an ASUS P4PE motherboard. For that I used the windows update utility created by ASUS. This utility was included to the drivers CD of ASUS. I tried the first time to update it and it failed. I tried again. It failed. I tried for the third time. Again it failed. I never understood how a utility created by ASUS was unable to update the BIOS of an ASUS motherboard. I reset my computer and that's it. No POST. No reboot. I ended up with a dead system The motherboard has a CrashFree feature in order to recover from a bad BIOS update. The problem was to reboot from floppy disk. But when you have no POST you have no reboot. There is a way to reboot from floppy drive if you remove the AGP graphics card form the motherboard. You write the old BIOS toy a diskette and a utility (aflash) and the system will be able to recover. The problem is that when you remove the AGP then you have nothing on the screen (you are blind). In order to see you must install a PCI graphics card. Thank you but I don't have one! I tried to use another utility and modify the autoexec.bat in order to start the update automatically. The system did some reading from the floppy and then nothing. It stopped. It failed For my bad lack I manage to destroy the original memory chip in which the BIOS is saved. In my case this was 49LF004A (a 512 KB EEPROM). No CrashFree feature could save my now. I bought from the internet some 49LF004A memories in order to replace the faulty one. But I had to program it by myself. So I created the circuit which it can be seen in the video. I also wrote a program in an old computer in order to write the appropriate bytes to the memory. I could write the original BIOS (the one which come with the motherboard) but I preferred to write the updated one (which the ASUS utility failed to write). When the process completed I installed the chip on the motherboard and I started the computer. Success. The computers did the familiar noise and automatically entered to BIOS settings. BIOS default and then save and reset. That was it. The system booted up and windows successfully loaded. Conclusion? NEVER UPDATE YOUR BIOS UNLESS IT IS NEEDED! http://www.piperidis.co.nr Tags: ASUS P4PE BIOS recover memory 49LF004A failed update CrashFree utility |
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