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Bios Flashing

JUST ADDED:Make sure you shut off all Cache Options in the Bios before Flashing.

With the frequency of Bios updates for motherboards today I thought it would be a good idea to put together a quick How-To on flashing your Bios.And no this has nothing to do with old men wearing raincoats!

First thing you will need is a good boot disk.You want a boot disk with the basics.No Cdrom drivers or any of that.The best one i have found so far is the Caldera Dr.Dos boot disk.You can get it from www.bootdisk.com or grab it from us here.Bootdisk.com is great place to find just about any type of bootdisk.Once you have the file open it,place a blank disk in you floppy drive and let it do the rest.

Now you will need the new Bios file and the latest flash utility for your board.Seeing as we are dealing with the VP6.Ill use it as an example.You can get the lates Bios and flash utility from Abit or from Abit's FTP.Once you have the file place it in a new folder and execute it.It will decompress into several files.One will be the actual Bios file along with the latest Award flashing utility.Abit also include a batch file to make the process simple.Its is usually named RUNME.After you have decompressed the file copy them all over to the boot disk you just made.

Ok by now you should have a boot disk along with all the Bios files for your Motherboard.Your all set to get started flashing the Bios now.First thing you want to do is stop the dog from chewing the power cord and tie the baby up away from the power switch on your computer.You want to make sure nothing interrupts the Flash while it is in progress.If this happens it will mess up your Bios and thats a bad thing;)

Ok make sure your boot disk is in the floppy drive and reboot.Once you get to an A: prompt type RUNME.This should bring up a series of "Are you sure you wanna Flash?" questions.Read them before you click thru them.You never know when there might be something there you should read.After this the Award flash Utility should pop up and start the flash.Wait till it completes and the reboot.

Now if your particular board doesnt have a Batch file to ease Bios flashing Simply type the name of the flash utility at the A: prompt IE: awdflash or what ever flashing utility you happen to be using.Also make sure you have the name of the bios bin file written down.Most flash utilitys will promt for the bios file you wish to flash.Type it in and it should walk you thru the rest of the process

Well if everything went smoothly you should now be rebooting with the new Bios.When it reboots hit delete and go into the Bios and reset any of the changes you may have set before you flashed.

Now flashing your Bios may not always go smoothly.Problems can happen.If this happens one thing you can try is to make a boot disk as follows.1.Make a clean Dr.Dos bootdisk
2. copy the awdflash & bios file
3. make an autoexec.bat like this
awdflash biosfile /py

Then power up and wait if everything goes well this should reflash the Bios.You wont see anything on the screen but give it a few minutes and it should reboot and with any luck you will be saved!And if it doesnt work the first time give it a few trys.I personally have done it as many as 10 times before it actually worked.If this does not work the board is not toast.You can either call up Abit and have them send you a new Bios chip for like 10 or 15$ or get a new Bios chip from a 3rd party Vendor.I have killed many a Bios myself;) One person that has helped me out many times is Jack who runs www.badflash.com .If you do happen to kill your Bios and cannot recover it yourself Jack can either reflash your bad Bios chip or flash a brand new one and send it to you.A good product to consider is the Bios Savior.Go and check it out.It is basically a Backup system for your Bios.

I hope I have helped someone with this How-To.If you have any comments or feel I am wrong about anything or that i should add something. Let me know.