In a message dated 4/1/01 9:22:03 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
bp19@OPERAMAIL.COM writes:


> The motherboard of which the bios I want to program is no longer operative,
> due to a mishap during flashing of bios.  So basicly flashing bios won't be
> possible unless you can get the board to start up, and this one gives no
> indication that it's doing anything of the sort.
>

Ahh...the infamous corrupt Flash programming. If you're lucky...this Flash
chip MIGHT have a section in it's memory known as the "boot-block."
Basically, the boot block provides the minimum amount of code to boot the
system up ONLY to the point where it can read the floppy drive and maybe
display some status on the monitor. The trick is to use a plain ole VGA card,
NOT PCI. If you don't have a VGA card, you'll have to do this blind. If the
floppy drive exhibits a little bit of activity when you turn on the PC,
that's a pretty good sign that there's a boot-block in effect.

If you wanna give this a try, do this.

Create a bootable floppy and copy the Award flash utility along with a
working BIOS image file.

Next, you'll need to make an autoexec.bat file. Use a text editor and add the
following lines:
@ECHO OFF
AwardFlash.exe biosimage.bin /py

Save it to the floppy as autoexec.bat. One note, you'll obviously need to
change "AwardFlash.exe" to the appropriate name for your Award flash utility.

If that fails...there's ONE last brutal step you can take; Hot swap! That's
for another day =)

Good Luck!

Tim Hamel

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