Success rate of BIOS flashing?

[Felecha]

I've had a thread running over in Operating Systems,

"I thought W2K was supposed to be stable ... "

and one of the suggested solutions to my problem was that the RAID controller might need a driver update, which led to advice that the way to do that is to upgrade the BIOS.

Not to get into all the details (unless you want to and of course I'll flood you with details) but it comes down to this -- I think I have located the correct downloads for the job, but I'm frankly nervous, and the question is -- How risky is flashing -- 100% OK, 90%, 50%?

Right now I get an annoying number of plain old freezes every day, and have to reboot. Compare that to a percentage chance of many unhappy hours/days of recovering from a BIOS disaster?? I have enough headaches in my life these days.

Anyone care to venture an estimate?

 

[AndyHui]

If you know exactly what you are doing, should be 95%.

If you've never done it before, you may want to get some help and go through with it carefully and slowly.

 

[Felecha]

Thanks

All I would know is to run the .exe's I got from the motherboard site, so 95% ....

 

[Sunner]

I've failed once, but I hafta put the blame for that one on QDI.

Had an old QDI mobo that was poorly marked, was called different things depending on whcih part of the world you was in, and the revision numbers were a mess, and all revisions(lots of them) had different BIOSes.

And the fact that QDI's homepage sucked didn't help either.

Most of my other mobos are Asus, and the one Im running now is an Epox, never had a problem with any of them.

 

[Felecha]

Mine's an ABIT KT7-RAID, and the RAID controller driver is the suspected culprit in my freezes. The ABIT site seems pretty clear as to which download is the one to get. Confusion about "the right one" isn't so much of a worry, it's just a general worry sort of thing

 

[alm99]

the Abit KT7 series is easy to flash. download the drdflash.exe file, then download the bios version you want. Format a new floppy, run the drdflash file FIRST! this will make a boot disk. Then run the new bios file you have so it extracts the contents(.bin file, awdflash, runme.bat, etc) copy those files to the newly formed boot disk. Then reboot your system w/floppy in the drive. Run the RUNME.bat file and follow the prompts.

 

[Felecha]

I found what I expect is what you mean by drdflash.exe -- seems to be a generic bootdisk for pre-flash booting?

So with that, plus the flash files from ABIT, you're saying it's a piece of cake??

What about the backup stuff, just in case? What exactly would I back up? And how? I'm remembering now that my Norton Utilities stuff has a Rescue utility that I believe backs up deep stuff like BIOS settings, but if the whole BIOS itself crashes, I doubt Recsue could be made to run, nespah?

I'm really wanting to know everything I can, since I gotta do it right one time only.

By the way, I see my current BIOS shows v.1.0.0622 for the HighPoint 370 controller, and the download is 1.11.0402, so there is some news there.

 

[BeauJangles]

If a flash of a BIOS fails, I don't believe there is much you can do to recover. I know you can try 'hot swapping' the chip from your mobo to one that is identical, and sometimes that works (I don't remember the process, but I'm sure there are plenty of people on AT that do, and would love to help, if that situation arose). The reason it is hard to recover from a bad flash is that if the update freezes 1/2 through, you have 1/2 of an old BIOS and 1/2 of a new one... generally that presents problems

Speaking from experience, Flashing isn't that hard. I flashed my kk266 (Iwill) six months ago. I just went to their page, downloaded what I needed, stuck it on a disk and printed out their instructions. 10 minutes later i was up and running perfectly.


Good Luck!

 

[Bakwetu]

100% so far but I have only flashed 10 times or so.

 

[hungrygoose]

i successfully flashed the bios of an ibm thinkpad laptop on my first flashing attempt......it was pretty easy........but i know what you mean about worrying and wanting to make sure everything worked fine.....it's not something that can be easily undone if it screws up so....you know, worrying is natural

 

[alm99]

Go to this site. Click on the BIOS link at the left then click on how do I update the BIOs. It will tell you just how to do it. Just do not shut off the power during the update and you should be fine. I just updated my BIOS this past weekend, I have a KT7. If you are really worried look into getting a BIOS Savior chip, it will protect you from a bad BIOS update. not sure where to get one though.

 

[sthreallyobscure]

i've flashed 5 boards and the best advice i can give is to get hold of, read and follow the instructions from ABIT. The only flash that went bad for me was when the instructions were in Taiwanese....POXY PC CHIPS BOARDS!!!

 

[Felecha]

Thanks for all the help. I gotta go for a while, I'll check back later. I did find a specific page at ABIT that has detailed advice, and I'm going to really study the details. After all the above chimes, I feel better, but still ...

Thanks again

F

 

[Zukatah]

When I flashed my Abit BE-6 Bios, everything went fine, but WinXP didn't like it very much, I didn't have ACPI anymore... Had to reformat, reinstall windows. Now everything's fine!

 

[J3anyus]

I've never had a bad flash, and I've done it probably a dozen times or so on various boards. Just make sure the power doesn't go out in the middle of flashing it

 

[jrini]

Congratulations! You have an ABIT mainboard. Their BIOS plugs into a socket. Worst case if the Flash goes bad is aroung $30.00 for a new BIOS from ABIT. Some manufacturers still solder the BIOS to the board. Then if the Flash fails, the board is trash. Go for it!

 

[Felecha]

Thanks to all for the input. I'll make time for it this weekend, I hope.

F