(Paul) writes:
In article , Charlie Root
wrote:
I got a chance to try Asus's crashfree bios2 on my k8v-se-d. That
feature works as well as the Asus's EZFLASH for the board, meaning not
at all.
The EZFLASH program found the new bios on the floppy, correctly erased
the flash, and then griped that it couldn't burn the new bios onto
flash. It effectively stopped there. Hitting the reset didn't cause
the crashfree-bios to find that the old bios in flash was defective
and get a new one from floppy. As far as I could tell it did nothing.
Ditto for putting the distribution CD into the dvd drive as instructed
in the manual. It also didn't load the original distribution bios
back.
I'm just beside myself that some firmware engineer at Asus would write
a flash program that didn't check that everything was in order before
erasing vital information.
-wolfgang
Have you tried the clear the cmos procedure
(with the computer unplugged) ?
I haven't tried that. My flash is already trashed. I didn't want to
trash the CMOS too. ;-)
Do you really think that would help?
What about pressing alt f2 at powerup, with a floppy or
CD in the drive with a file at the root level with the
right file name ? I think on my motherboard CD, there is
a P4C800ED.ROM file or something on it. You may need to
rename whatever file you are feeding it, to whatever
the default name is for your board (K8VSEDX.ROM). If you
examine your CD on another computer, you should be able to
see that file at the top (root) level.
That was the first thing I tried. It didn't do anything. I even took
the original Asus CD to another computer to check when nothing
happened and the CD did indeed have the K8VSEDX.ROM file in the root
directory.
I also tried with a home-made cd with the new 1003 bios on it. Ditto
for a floppy containing a 1003 bios. (Well the cd was actually a dvd,
but the dvd player looks like a cd player to software.)
The only reason I suggest that, is I've been searching on
"crashfree" and reading threads over on Abxzone. And there
are other boards that fail the crashfree test. The complicating
factor seems to involve the boot block. Either the boot block
programming was defective in the first place (the bad Asus
firmware engineer theory) or one of those "wrapper script"
flash programs was provided with the BIOS release, and it
includes the param to specify erasing the boot block as well.
You have no escape via crashfree, if the boot block is erased.
Well, I tried upgrading from EZFLASH which is their code-word for
"update the bios from a mini-bios on the board". As far as I know
there wasn't any wrapper script involved unless the ROM image on the
disk has facilities for erasing/overwriting things it shouldn't.
In any case the ball is firmly in their court. The support call has
been in at http://Helpdesk.asus.com/ for over 12hrs now. They should
be having their first coffee now.
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...74&postcount=5
Ah, now this is interesting...
http://www.ami.com/support/doc/AMIBI...epaper_v10.pdf
Very interesting! Thanks for digging this up.
If some protected bios boot blocks got erased, I'm not sure it would
help me any more but it is interesting to see that they thought of the
issues. Too bad the testing was so spotty.
so it isn't purely an Asus engineer - the AMI guy had a hand in
it too :-)
That doc says to press ctrl and home down on the keyboard,
then switch on the power. Try that instead of alt f2. I've
also seen holding down insert mentioned, but maybe that was just
to enter the BIOS.
control-home pressed before and during power-up didn't do
anything.
As an aside, how do they expect you to hit control-home and the
case power switch at the same time??? Do these companies hire
octopuses?
-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht
http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
New toy: Voice over ip phone. Sounds much better than an analog phone.
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