flashing BIOS - brown trousers time

misterPK · 29 Mar 2008 at 10:33

I recently got a dual core athlon x2 as an upgrade for my ST20G5 shuttle. I'd read that in order to get it working I'd need to update the bios. Now I've read a lot of bad things about updating the bios, so I've been pretty nervous about it.

I've got award flash running off a bootable floppy, with the bios .bin file, but its been sitting at "Please Wait!" for about 10 minutes now, and I'm starting to panic. Has it all gone horribly wrong or does it normally take a while?

Cheers,
PK!

badbob · 29 Mar 2008 at 10:37

Flashing should take no longer than a couple of minutes. 10 minutes sounds like it's crashed :-(

misterPK · 29 Mar 2008 at 10:45

well the good news is when i hit the reset button i could still get into the bios. I'm trying again but it seems to be doing the same thing. I have a feeling it could be the floppy disk thats a bit buggered, as its probably a fair few years old!

PK!

badbob · 29 Mar 2008 at 10:51

I'd recommend creating a MS-DOS FAT32 partition on a HD, and flash from that.

misterPK · 29 Mar 2008 at 11:12

Boo-yah!

3rd time lucky!

I reformatted the disk and tried again, and this time no problems! I had to take a bit of a gamble as there wasn't enough space on the disk to make a backup copy of the old BIOS, but the new one has gone on and its working fine and recognising my x2. Now to do battle with a windows install!

Thanks for the help!

PK!