Botched ATI graphics flash, what can I do ?

[Combat squirrel]

Got a Radeon 8500 AGP card with a borked bios, its physically fine, how do I 'blind flash' it back to norm ? its a HERC 8500LE AGP

 

[Vegeta]

Hi, blind flash will only work if you turn the pc on and you hear the normal beep, all you basically do is put the floppy drive in - let it boot with ati flash or whatever then wait a bit to make sure its there, then type in ati flash bla bla backup.rom if you made a backup then wait.
If it does nothing press Y just incase its stuck on that screen asking if it should flash or not.
Best way todo it (the way I do it) is buy a cheap PCI graphics card, bought a matrox 8mb thing for a fiver, put that into my PCI slot while the AGP card is in the slot and then do it that way (that way its not blind).
Is this doesnt work, its because your bios is set to AGP first, so take the agp card out, put the PCI one in, change to PCI first, then but the agp back in and flash it.

 

[Voodle]

Why not just boot up using a pci video card instead?
You might have to go into the bios first to tell it to boot from PCI instead but it should be a simple matter to reflash the card from there.

edit: beaten

 

[Mekrel]

Or make a bootable DOS disk with the ATi flash utility and make a autoexec.bat to run the flash utility and its command line swithces automatically.

 

[Vegeta]

Or make a bootable DOS disk with the ATi flash utility and make a autoexec.bat to run the flash utility and its command line swithces automatically.

Yep, wont work for most as the pc doesnt boot at all when the card is in, like it does with mine everytime i bork up a flash so PCI is you best bet/way of knowing it has definetly been done.

 

[megatron]

Ive used blind flash with autoexec.bat before. Any motherboard's default settings are to boot from floppy when one is detected.