Unflashing a BIOS

[mindido]

OK, here's the deal. A little while back I was working on a machine that was only about a year and a half old. Two of the RAM slots went bad so I built another machine for the client and sent the mobo into the manufacturer for repair. Just got it back two days ago and rebuilt it today. The RAM slots are fine but there is now a major problem. Some tech at the manufacturer probably fixed the slots and then decided to flash the BIOS and apparently didn't test it after the flash. Now, the BIOS screens take forever (about 4 minutes) before getting to the HD and the whole system is very unstable. I've had to go into the BIOS today about 6 times as the system "forgets" that a HD and CDRW are attached and have to be found again. A definite pain.

Somewhere along the line I noticed some new numbers on the initial screen and did some investigating. Thats how I found out that they'd flashed the BIOS. Anyway, does anyone know the procedure for going back to an earlier BIOS version? I found the manufacturers website for the mobo and there are 19 revisions. So another question may be; How far back should I go? I don't think I ever flashed the clients BIOS as it was working fine (so why change it).

The particulars:

Gigabyte GA-K8NS mobo
2.5 GB RAM
AMD 64 2.8 GHz CPU

Any constructive ideas would be appreciated.

 

[mindido]

Grap,

contact the manufacturer

I'll do that tomorrow but they're not working on the weekend.

To make the motherboard work i had to buy a new EEPROM from the Motherboards manufacturer (total costs : 124 Dollar)(just not enough to buy a complete new motherboard.)

A new equivalent mobo around here would be about $100 so I'm not going to go through that.

There might be a completely new addition in your BIOS were your PC is not equipped yet.

Thats pretty much my concern.

Thanks for the info.

 

[kimosabi]

hiya mate
just incase you have'nt got the problem resolved yet

if you have award bios,
1.get awdflash
2.download the latest version of your mobo's bios (you will need to get the correct revision for your exact mobo)
3.run awdflash and install the new bios

you may need to read about awdflash before using it, as i cannot remember exactly how you use it, and its best to know what you're doing before attempting things like that

i had problems with my mobo not accepting my 160GB HDD after installing winxp, yet everything was fine on win 2000, thats how i found out about flashing, but luckily, my asus mobo has its own flash utility, which is feckin easy to use


however if you dont have award bios, im sure there should be a similar program for your BIOS


they say flashing can damage your hardware if not done correctly, but if a BIOS doesn't work 100% just re-flash it with another

 

[mindido]

I'm sorry, I forgot to update with the final fix for this problem. Oh well, better late than never.

As it turns out, the problem was the old Western Digital HD that I was using to test her machine. The HD was OK but I had set the jumper on it to Master instead of Cable Select (or vice versa). Since I had set it to Master, this HD was looking for a slave (which wasn't there) so it was slowing down the BIOS. Once I changed the jumper and rebooted, it started normally.

Oh well, learn something new every day. This is apparently a problem with older Western Digital drives so keep that in the back of your mind.