Hot flash 8RDA+ bios chip with 4BDA2+ board?

[Smultron]

Thats the guestion...

This is what happened. I clocked the t-bred too far.. windoze didnt load.. got back to bios and altered the settings to lower values and saved in exit.. after which the screen went scruwed and now board doesnt come up any more ..tried ofcource clearing the cosmos wit jumper and removing the battery ..FF -code appears as soon as i press the start button.

So the bios must have gotten bad in that Save&Exit.

Thought that i try hot flash wit my another Epox P4 board.. it seems to have the same kind of chip. But do you have sure information if this operation is possible??? Concerned if those chips have the same specs...

[ckevin]

Originally posted by Smultron
Thats the guestion...

This is what happened. I clocked the t-bred too far.. windoze didnt load.. got back to bios and altered the settings to lower values and saved in exit.. after which the screen went scruwed and now board doesnt come up any more ..tried ofcource clearing the cosmos wit jumper and removing the battery ..FF -code appears as soon as i press the start button.

So the bios must have gotten bad in that Save&Exit.

Thought that i try hot flash wit my another Epox P4 board.. it seems to have the same kind of chip. But do you have sure information if this operation is possible??? Concerned if those chips have the same specs...

I've hot swapped & programmed pin-compatible bios chips before on Pentium boards. You can check under the labels of the bios chips to get the part numbers & check the web to see if they're compatible. On the board I was using to program, I made sure to enable "system bios cacheable" before doing the operation, I don't know if it makes a difference but it couldn't hurt.

[Holst]

There both 2mb so it will work in theory.

Not a recomended way of doing things min you, please do be carefull when hot flashing its quite easy to turn one bad board into two bad ones.

it may also be that you dont have a bios problem at all on 8RDA+, are you able to verify that your other components are good and that nothing (CPU/memory) was damaged by the overclock ?

[Smultron]

yes all the other components are just fine.. tested all of them. Also tried the hot flash, but wasn´t able to do it all the way. When i got to the flashing operation... Awardflasher said that "Unknown flash type" ...tried also with the /F -switch but same result.

I ques i got to find another way to flash the bioschip. ..what a pity, because so far this one was working totally stable at 211MHz FSB/MEM. Well i´m pretty sure that with new bios it will work again.

It is strange that bios can get hosed like this when saving new values to it... never before has this kind of failure happened to me and i have been OC`ing like a mofo for over 5 years.

edit: ...ummh i forgot to enable "system bios cacheable" in the bios before the flash.. but this should not make any differense.. should it?

[stinger]

exactly the same thing happened to me to. very strange raised the fsb and saved it, restart and then checksum error. How can I trust this board again?

[Smultron]

I quess the only way to be sure that the bios doesn´t get hosed.. is that you always clear the cmos when you spot instability at booting. This way you can be sure that next time when you change the values in bios everything is absolytely stable. Not very practical but this seems to me as only possibility to OC at the limits of the hardware with this particular board.

Spare bios chip would be exellent.. is it possible to get one from Epox -tech?

[Repo Man]

Smultron, you may have one last chance to make it work. Go to www.wimsbios.com and get the Uniflash utility. It may work where Award wouldn't. I've used it for numerous hot swap flashes, but it doesn't work on everything. It won't work with my Abit board, it evidently has an undocumented write protect feature. Good luck!

[ckevin]

That wimsbios site is interesting. I found this method in their FAQ which might also work for you, I've never heard of it before:


Solution 1: Boot-block BIOS

Modern motherboards have a boot-block BIOS. This is small area of the BIOS that doesn't get overwritten when you flash a BIOS. The boot-block BIOS only has support for the floppy drive. If you have a PCI video card you won't see anything on the screen because the boot-block BIOS only supports an ISA videocard.

Award: The boot-block BIOS will execute an AUTOEXEC.BAT file on a bootable diskette. Copy an Award flasher & the correct BIOS *.bin file on the floppy and execute it automaticly by putting awdflash *.bin in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

AMI: The AMI boot-block BIOS will look for a AMIBOOT.ROM file on a diskette. Copy and rename the correct BIOS file on the floppy and power up the PC. The floppy doesn't need to be bootable. You will see the PC read the floppy, after about 4 minutes you will hear 4 beeps, this means the transfer is done. Reboot the PC and modify the CMOS for your configuration.

[Repo Man]

I have never been able to get a boot block flash to work. I'd be curious to know if anyone reading this ever has? I don't mean to discourage you from trying it Smultron, it could be I've not been editing the autoexec.bat correctly or something.
Here is a detailed boot block flash guide: www.sysopt.com/articles/recoverbios/

[Smultron]

BACK IN THE GAME!

A recovery flash was impossible because the board didn´t do anythin ecept show the FF-code when firing up.

Found one guy who had the same board in the same city and he was so great that allowed me to do the hot flash wit his board.. everything went perfectly.. and now my board is running again.. 9.5X211 ..2005MHz wit 1800+ t-bred and aircooling.

[EluSiOn]

good to hear that

[Smultron]

..earlier tried also the uniflasher, but it gave me runtime errors ..so it didn´t help.