did i just hose my motherboard? wrong bios

B

black_b[ ]x

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 1, 2002
Messages
1,753
Just tried to "update" my bios but wasn't thinking clearly. I used the gigabyte utility to install the latest bios for the GA-7VTXE... and put it onto my MSI Neo Platinum. Now it won't boot, just shuts off after a few seconds. is there any way around this or did i just hose that computer? timing for this really isnt good :(
 
you can find a friend with the same motherboard and do a 'hot swap' bios flash. or get a new one from the manufacturer
 
I don't use Gigabyte products, but I expect you're stuffed.

Check your manual: you might be able to boot to a BIOS flash utility; ASUS boards do that with ALT+F2. You might also be able to boot to DOS from a floppy. Perhaps the manual tells you that these features are in protected flash, or that there's some way to restore from a mirror flash.

I'm surprised to see that the board accepted the mismatched BIOS without failing a signature check.

Otherwise, you need to buy a new BIOS or RMA the board for BIOS replacement.
 
thanks, i'll probably have to send it back. just to clarify, I put the gigabyte bios onto the MSI board, so my MSI board is the broken one. The flash utility did popup and say that the size of the BIOS was mismatched, but for whatever reason I didnt think that meant invalid.
 
You don't need the same motherboard to hotflash. All you need is the same style bios chip. If you have another computer around you could give it a try.
 
Ahh.. so only the physical dimensions of the EEPROM need to match? I think thats the case, they both look like PLCC. might have to improvise a chip puller though.

anyone with an Award bios done a recovery? MSI's website says to put their flash utility and rom on a bootable disk, with an autoexec.bat that executes the flash utility. I thought you had to get past POST for an autoexec.bat to work though, is that not correct? maybe its a special case. guess i need to find that spare floppy drive to try it out.

I made the bootdisk on a win98 machine... damn thing was too big to fit the utility and rom, so i removed what seemed to be files only associated with loading a CD drive. (per the NOCD vs. CD options in the setup menu)

also, most websites I found mentioned that the autoshutoff should only happen if the CPU is overheating... could that be my problem? or another problem? it turns on for maybe 6-10 seconds and then shuts itself off. maybe its not finding the floppy drive and giving up?
 
I suppose it's possible that it's overheating -- but if the machine ran fine before and your fan is still working, it doesn't seem likely.
 
If you go tot he MSI site and look for the latest bios for your board you will also see a bios recovery routine that seems to work pretty well. All it requires is a floppy and the latest bios. You rename the bios to what they tell you and it forces a fresh write to the boot block and then updates the bios.

Luck
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top