BIOS FLASHING

With today's newer PC's flashing the BIOS is likely not as popular as it once was, but still theres tons of PC's that are older but still chug along nicely even with multiple hours, weeks, months, and years of run time on them.

One of mine is one of them, a PCchips M810L Rev9.0M

It took a long time for me before i gathered up enough courage to chance blowing a Mobo but eventually took that plunge. Problem is, as overclocked as the CPU is now, and it posts up fine, i'm experiencing some side-effects when changing out Hard Drives like inserting a WD for a SeaGate and so on.

I find i'm having to enter the BIOS Settings when swapping different drives and manually press Auto-Detect all drives before the changed Hard Drive can be recognized, so i decided to re-flash again and just return the default .ROM bios back to what it was before.

Problem is i forgotten the best way to manage this flash routine. I checked around overclockers forums and this and that and finally found a Windows 98 boot disk with limited drivers just for flashing a BIOS.

Has anyone here done a BIOS FLASH by making a XP MS-DOS boot-disk from their system and adding the .ROM & Flash Utility then setting it to boot first with success?

I tried it with a floppy and immediately got an I/O fault warning. I done this times before but not for a long while and now wondering which would be the best method to carry this out.

It's strictly advised "NOT" to flash from the Hard Drive with a NTFS file system so it's neccessary to try it with either a floppy or CD.

Should i or can i just disconnect any hard drives and try to run the floppy with the default BIOS .ROM to get this job done? Is this better or safer then leaving the drive (IDE/ATA) connected while i attempt this routine?

Like to read any feedback on it anyone might offer. Thanks

EASTER

 

Hello Easter,
i never flashed the bios on my older computers but on my new pc i have flashed the bios mainly because its easy to reload the old bios if the bios flashing goes wrong and the bios upgrade will fix some issues.
i have always kept my hard drives connected and had no issues.
since your motherboard is quite old and doesnt have any utility like ezflash then the floopy disc with limited driver support would most likely do.
what socket motherboard is it?

 

You got me there. I used to keep a log on this older unit for data like that but ut's been running so well without issues it's probably buried in tons of archives someplace.

I know it's the modified HoneyX BIOS that's making this issue because i went thru it once before. The modded BIOS is ok and all that but since i swap out internals often i been running into this problem, and i rather just return the default BIOS back as it was because i don't run into this with the normal one.

EASTER

 

Finally got it reflashed with no problems.

I took the liberty this time to "SAVE" those critical data files on the floppy to store where they won't get lost again.

:MISSION ACCOMPLISHED:

 

A quick google shows it to be an AMD Socket 462 motherboard .

 

Bought and setup a new xeon 945 quadcore system yesterday with the new Asus P5k-E board coming up with "processor not recognised" press F1 to continue message at every boot.

First time I've tried to flash the bios with the hardest part being trying to find the needed updated bios.

Once I had downloaded the bios rom file I copied it to a usb then booted back into bios and used the inbuilt EZ flash utility which you have to point the saved updated bios rom file to.

In the end it was quite easy but I did get a tad frustrated along the way with Vista and XP running fine atm on their own WD640 gig drives with no hitting F1 to continue message.

 

Thanks, i'll make a note of that. I'm surprised this PCchips Mobo is even still running after 4 years of severe and many times non-stop activity. Only the Power Supply and CPU Fan is ever needed replaced.

It's an oddball for sure, on-board single memory module + on-board CPU built in with no way to replace. (Soldered)

Still the BIOS chip must be equally durable in these models since i've flashed it a half a dozen times in the past with no probs.

By the way, since the default BIOS is back, the posts are accepting/recognizing changing out different drives without issue now.

But i absolutely detest Towers, so hope to run across some desk cases at a PC fair or market. Their so much easier for me to pull the top off and access all hardware unlike the cram and stack towers that some are.

EASTER