Does anyone own a Gateway NX100X (E-100M) notebook?

[nortexoid]

To anyone who owns this notebook, I have a huge favor to ask: if you have a bios version lower than 76.16 (e.g. 76.12 or 76.10) could you back it up using the Phoenix flash utility and email it to me?

I tried flashing to 76.19 (the latest) from who-knows-what version and now the device won't boot from anything (though it does post and can enter the bios setup!) I reflashed the eeprom to 76.16 by oddly the exact same problem. Gateway refuses to send me previous versions of the bios for some reason, so now I'm desperately looking for anyone with the same laptop who hasn't updated their bios and who might be able to send me their bios version (which should save as a rom file). Otherwise I've just made a $1400 brick--very frightening.

Thanks!

p.s. send to niburu1@hotmail.com. I will reward your kindness!

 

[mpilchfamily]

Wouldn't be surprised if the problem stems from a bad flash and not a bad bios.

 

[nortexoid]

So you're saying that the chip was badly flashed three times in a row, twice using an eeprom programmer? And every time the bad flash resulted in exactly the same problem? And from two different bios versions? It would seem impossible then to properly flash it.

 

[mpilchfamily]

CHnaces are the inital flash caused the problem and the other flashs did nothing to help or further mess things up. May want to contact the manufatur about the probelm.

 

[nortexoid]

The manufacturer, Gateway, is USELESS. I've ended up purchasing a motherboard for my laptop that I found on ebay. Who knows if it works. But then again, who cares. I just hope the Winbond chip on it is functional. Who would've thought a simple bios flash would've turned into such a nightmare?!

 

[IlllI]

yep. their customer support has gone down the crapper past couple years. i think it has something to do with being bought by acer

 

[nortexoid]

For anyone reading this in the same predicament: I just received my used (possibly broken) NX100X motherboard. I put its bios chip in my motherboard and lo and behold, it's back alive (I'm typing from it right now). This proves that the bioses provided by gateway don't work on all models. That's fucked. What's worse is that I could've solved the problem had they SIMPLY provided me with the bios version requires (76.10). Instead I had to get tremendously lucky by finding a possibly broken mainboard on ebay that had a working bios chip and old bios on it. Brutal. I will never buy gateway again.