BIOS Flashing and Related Information

BIOS flashing is an integral part of bug fixing and overclocking hardware. Done correctly it can solve that 'new build RAM incompatability' problem, or can can help you achieve that hardware toasting overclock that you spent all your money to attain.
Of course, done badly it can earn you an invalidated warranty and cost you the price of a replacement motherboard.

I thought it'd be useful if people posted their experiences with flashing motherboard BIOS' i.e,

i) Flashing techniques on a variety of manufacturers products. Which are easiest/best/worst? etc
ii) Any tales of success. (Does that 2GB kit you just spent £200 on work now that you flashed the BIOS?)
iii) Any tales of woe. (Have you killed your mobo/other related hardware in the process? Has your beloved pc blown up in a cataclysmic burst of 240v fury?)

Personally i have one tale of woe and one of success. My old mobo was a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 which i had no success in overclocking. (This was back in my newbie days!) The board has a dual BIOS so it should have been fool-proof. Obviously they'd never met me before Using The provided software in a Windows environment i should have been able to d/load and flash the BIOS without trouble. It didn't work on the main BIOS so i tried the back-up with both ending up as corrupt as a result

So at this point it was a perfect excuse to spring for a DFI board which were starting to get rave reviews at the time.

The Ultra-D i bought shipped with the oldest BIOS there was for the board and it stubbornly refused to overclock. It was fine at stock but anything over 200HTT and it would refuse to boot. The latest BIOS revision at the time was the 623-3 so i flashed my board with it using the method on the DFI site..

"...1. Prepare one piece of clean floppy diskette.
2. Run the BIOS file from website directly or copy it to HDD to run.
3. It will image to floppy disk drive "A" including flash utility, BIOS file along with instruction and create booting program automatically.
4. Boot up the system from FDD. It will automatically flash the BIOS.
5. Press "F1" as instructed when completing the flashing.
6. Run "Load Optimized Defaults" or "Load Setup Defaults" in BIOS after completing the BIOS flashing."

This was a very easy method to use and the new BIOS worked a treat. Since then i haven't looked back and have been overclocking like my life depends on it

What inspired me to start this thread was seeing so many people having trouble or unexpected behaviour with their new motherboards who were missing this crucial piece of the puzzle.

Hopefully between us we can fill the thread with a font a flashing knowledge and experience that could be a useful reference for everyone using the forum.

Flashed about 10 Bioses on PCs I have built myself. Only ever had 1 problem when Win2000 came out & would only run with W2K compliant bios. After flashing the Bios it corrupted the mobo and destroyed it. The mobo company had also gone bust so no way to contact them and get a spare bios chip. My only choice was to either:

1:Buy another mobo (not possible as @ the time it was AGPx2 Slot370 +168 pin ram and those were being phased out).

2:Buy a new mobo+cpu+ram+gfx card.

Had to go for option 2 as in those days it was very hard to find PC components easily. This meant I had to fork out for almost an entire PC (gfx+ram+mobp+psu) as all those components had changed since my last PC build. Cost me over £600 which in 2000 was a lot of money for a PC I can tell you.

Motto of this is that it is always best to only flash the Bios of your mobo if it supports Bios backups so if it goes wrong you can just reboot and the working bios gets restored. If your mobo does not support some form of bios backup then a problem can cost you a lot of money/time/hassle! Another option is to contact the mobo maker and get a spare bios chip then flash that so that you have 2 then if one fails no problem to swap it out.

W2K, what's that?

Seriously though, some good advice there. I haven't had much experience with BIOS backup functions although i think the Gigabyte may have had one. My own stupid fault for not using it i guess although i'm glad it's led to to where i am now. I believe that's known as serendipity!

Thanks for the input dude. I live and learn

ASUS A8n32-sli

Flashed this board 6 or 7 times without a hitch.

First off DO NOT flash your motherboard while it is in an overclocked state. Write down your settings and 'load setup defaults' in the bios - just to be on the safe side as you do not want a 'crash' when the bios is being flashed!

Use the 'EZ-flash' method

1. Format floppy
2. Download Bios (1009 is the latest)
3. Extract Bios to desktop
4. Rename bios to A8N32SLI.rom
5. Copy A8N32SLI.rom to floppy
5. reboot
6. On POST press ALT+F2

I have also used AFUDOS which works just aswell, although is more time consuming to setup.

ASUS Update will not work if you have a creative XFI soundcard (conflict) as the update tool will not recognise your ASUS motherboard. I have used it on other ASUS boards and it also works well although I prefer to flash using DOS.

Some useful info there w3bbo, ta!

Your mentioning X-Fi has reminded me that on my Ultra-D the soundcard was causing POST problems and which could only be solved with a BIOS update. I believe all the X-Fi cards released since the first generation ones have had a firmware update to fix this problem, so if you are buying one new you should be ok. If you purchase one second hand you may encounter this problem.

Another example of how BIOS flashing can solve hardware related problems.

I posted this in the DFI Expert thread but thought it might help, (floppy as first boot device, load optimised defaults in BIOS), at desktop, right click floppy icon, format, make MS-DOS startup disk, extract flash files to floppy then restart with it in the drive, then at a/ prompt:

AWDFLASH.EXE (BIOS file name).BIN /py /sn /cd /cp /cc /LD /R /f

Then leave it alone until it finishes and then reboots, eject floppy, go into BIOS load optimised defaults, save then reboot.