BIOS dead or XP dead?

[Jeremy]

On the P4 machine, i used gigabyte's windows based bios update utility to update the bios to version F9 (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw). It apparently downloaded fine. Then it tells you to reboot. When i rebooted, the colourful "logo" (a yellow bitmap with the bios' features displayed such as "qflash" and "dual bios") disappeared, and instead i had the regular awardbios screen (with the memory counting and the beep) which i never say before. Then right after the "boot from cd" line of text, the disk does its little "trashing" for about 1 second, and usually the XP logo fades in. this time it just stays black. The bios appears to be fine, as it still remembers the password the manufacturer has applied and not given to me, and the award bios screen reports 100MHz x 18, 262144k ram, intel 845 chipset, version F9, etc. Did xp succumb to the BIOS, or did the BIOS retain a password, but lost critical settings? I can get the startup menu with the F8 key, but all the modes (safe, prompt, last known good, etc.) do the same thing. I tried using recovery console from the XP CD, but i couldn't see anything wrong, nor did chkdsk. XP is supposed to be very stable, but...:(

[LT-73]

Hmmm, maybe you should clear cmos and reset evrything back to default then check.

[Burke]

I have the 8IRXP board. Gigabyte recommends restoring the default settings after a flash.

You could also try switching the DualBIOS to the backup, which is done by going into the BIOS and hitting F8 and changing the computer to boot from the backup. I personally find flashing the BIOS through the F8 DualBIOS command easier than anything else.

But I think the larger issue is that, no matter how many people say it works for them, Windows-based utilities to flash a BIOS are more trouble than they're worth. It's more work to do it the old fashioned way via DOS (and it can be done through DOS in XP, using a Win98 boot disk), but Gigabyte's web site tells you all the steps. Again, doing through F8 in the BIOS is a breeze, plus you'll know right away if there has been a flash problem.

Luckily, Gigabyte's Windows flash program is light years ahead of others like MSI's, which trashes more BIOSes than it updates, including three of the 845 Ultra-ARU boards I had. Even though it's mostly reliable, I'd stay far away from it if you can and use floppies.

[Jeremy]

Right now it's at the store for repairs (under warranty thank god). Would the password be lost if i used a boot floppy (like i did for my old pc) to flash the BIOS? Note that i can't even get the dualbios to work bc the admin pwd. i know that all other settings within the bios are lost, and i generally load optimized defaults. However, my warrantly is void should i flash the bios traditionally (as i can always blame them for installing the gigabyte utility which lured me to flash). I'll just wait and see.

BTW, i did this flash both for getting a new version of the BIOS and a performance problem: my hard disk (maxtor 40GB 7200rpm ATA133). Usually, it benchmarks at about 40000KB/sec +/- 1000KB using Mpower, on par with my friend's identical drive in an AMD 1700+. Lately, it's been getting about 25000Kb/sec +/- 3000Kb/sec, which sounds a little disturbing. My PCMark 2002 disk mark also fell from over 800 (usually 820-880) to about 700. Could this, in conjunction with the boot problem, indicate a dying disk? It is using ATA100 (mode 5) interface according to WinXP, and it is the only drive on the 80p cable. Why the big drop in performance? I just used diskeeper to defragment it anyhow, and it is only 10% full.

[Jeremy]

indeed it was a bad bios. i'll stick to classic boot disks.