Restoring old BIOS with PCI card support

I recently flashed my Geforce2 AGP card with the latest available Bios.
Using NVflash all went as expected and I got a message confirming that it
had been successfully updated. On reboot, however, I got correct colours and
positioning for all text but there was a lot of additional unstable text and
the whole screen was unreadable. Using my boot disk and then the NVflash
disk I carefully tried to restore the backup of my bios using the correct
keyboard commands. This led to error boots and no success. Reflashing the
new bios was also unsuccessful with more beeps.

I have read in this newsgroup that it is possible to use a PCI card to get
back boot up to the command prompt and then to reflash the AGP card
correctly. Can anyone walk me through the exact steps to do this. My biggest
worry is that I might flash the PCI card instead :-( and make this one
unusable as well. (I need it for my backup PC!)

Thanks
PaulQ


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"PaulQ" wrote in message ...
I recently flashed my Geforce2 AGP card with the latest available Bios.
Using NVflash all went as expected and I got a message confirming that it
had been successfully updated. On reboot, however, I got correct colours and
positioning for all text but there was a lot of additional unstable text and
the whole screen was unreadable. Using my boot disk and then the NVflash
disk I carefully tried to restore the backup of my bios using the correct
keyboard commands. This led to error boots and no success. Reflashing the
new bios was also unsuccessful with more beeps.

I have read in this newsgroup that it is possible to use a PCI card to get
back boot up to the command prompt and then to reflash the AGP card
correctly. Can anyone walk me through the exact steps to do this. My biggest
worry is that I might flash the PCI card instead :-( and make this one
unusable as well. (I need it for my backup PC!)

There's a security warning if you attempt to flash a card with the BIOS not meant for it, unless the
options -u and -p are appended to the nvflash command.

-p = Don't pause if file & chip PCI VendID/DevID mismatch
-u = Don't pause if file & chip PCI subsystem ID mismatch

You can also identify the card to be flashed by displaying the first 512 bytes in its EPROM with the command:
nvflash -d 512.

The PCI card should be the primary display adapter. To make sure it is, just remove your AGP card, power up
the PC and go into BIOS setup. Then set the graphics adapter priority to PCI/AGP and save the changes. Now,
insert the AGP card and boot onto the diskette with the nvflash4.46 package extracted to it.

http://whitebunny.demon.nl/download?...flash_4.46.zip

Enter the command nvflash -f filename.rom. Try nvflash -p -u -f filename.rom if the flash failed.

Use an earlier version of nvflash if you're still getting nowhere.

http://whitebunny.demon.nl/download?...flash_4.41.zip

Tony.

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