Restoring Good BIOS File Problems

[King of Camelot]

Basically I was doing some fooling around with the BIOS file & on reboot I got a checksum error. Note this is all on an 8K5A2+ board. So I have tried a couple of times now to flash it again using the old BIOS file but every time it starts to flash the 'Programming flash memory' progress bar stands still, & won't change even after 45 mins. So I seem stuck without a way to get my bios working again. Any one have any suggestions? Is my bios chip damaged? Do I need a replacement chip?

[golfer49]

Try ****ting system down, unplug, clear bios with jumper, power up, hold down insert key, while tapping delete key, if you can get into bios, load optimized defaults, save and exit, if it boots up ok, you can go back the next time and make additional changes.

[King of Camelot]

(NOTE: In my original message, when I say 'messing around with the BIOS file' i mean the BIN file, then I flashed it, then I rebooted)
Thats the thing, I don't get anything when I boot up, every time I boot up I get this exact message:

Award BootBlock BIOS V1.0
Copyright (C) 2000, Award Software, Inc.

BIOS ROM checksum error

Detecting floppy drive A media...

then it looks for a floppy, if i put in the boot disk it will let me access the A drive, but if I try to flash a new or old or original bios file in, the progress bar will just sit there for ever & nothing will end up happening.

[XBladeX]

King of Camelot had that problem myself just unplug the whole Pc and clear Cmos worked for me make sure you have awardflash version 8.22a and ya should be fine hope it works for you

cheers Blade

[WebDude]

I trashed the bios on my 8k5a2+ cmos when I tried to flash from a defective floppy (as I later learned). That put me in exactly your situation. My bios "boot block" was seemingly intact. I could boot to a floppy, load the dos OS, and get the "A" prompt. But when I tried to run the flash program, it would just sit there forever. Now this is supposed to be doable. As long as your boot block is intact you should theoretically be able to reflash the chip. Theoretically that is. I tried shorting the jumper, powering off for a long period, and everything else I could think of. But I couldn't get it to work, and I still don't know why. I finally got ahold of Epox tech support and they said I probably needed a new chip. So they shipped me one, I bought a chip puller tool from Radio Shack, pulled the old chip, put the new one in, and am now happily up and running with the new chip.

[Repo Man]

Here is a link to how to do a bootblock flash. Hopefully this will get you running again.
http://www.sysopt.com/articles/recoverbios/

[DaveyBoy]

Hello there. I've just stumbled into this exact problem with my 8k5a3+ board When i installed a new Thoroughbred Athlon XP2000 chip. My symtoms are exactly as King of camalot describes, and i too have tried everything. The alt + F2 doesnt work, and the floppy disc method just freezes indefinetly. i tried making a boot disc with the modifies autoexec.bat as descibed on the page http://www.sysopt.com/articles/recoverbios However, this didnt work for me. So, anyone else reading this know what else i can do to flash the bios again, also, are there more than one version of a working and suitable bios for this board that i could try? Thanks.

[kh1234567890]

Originally posted by DaveyBoy
i tried making a boot disc with the modifies autoexec.bat as descibed on the page

Try taking the CMOS battery out, give it a while to discharge and try flashing with the battery out. On the 8RDA+ bios I did not need any operating system on the floppy, just awdflash.exe (I used a version from one of the EPoX sites, ISTR it ended in j - as the first file) and the bios image as the second file on a freshly formatted floppy. The bios bootloader seemed to be happy with this.

kh

[DaveyBoy]

Ive just tried taking the cmos bat out, but unfortunately it didnt prevent the awardBIOS flash utility from freezing again. Apparently, this freezing is caused by haveing a wrong / corrupt *.bin file. Now, the Epox site gives one .bin file per board that it suggests is the safest, but the "other bios's" link takes me to some chinese langause garbage that isnt helpful at all. (Anyone else get this?) So my next question is this: Where can i get a list of available bios's to download and try? thx.