Help please flashing IBM / Gigabyte board

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I am getting the same issue with my Aptiva. Can't do the update. It thinks it's the wrong bios update. It then suggests that the jumpers may be set to lock the bios, but as far as can see (and I've tried many different things with the jumpers) it's not the case.

Have you found any help elsewhere?

No have not gotten any help. Luckily, I work at a business that has IBM techs and reps that support us, so they are looking into it for me. I think mine has something to do with the revision of the board, but not sure.

The bios agent I got from the link at the third post in this string.I copied it to a floppy after downloading.I Booted from a start up disc then ran the agent from another.The info gave me exactly the machine type and the exact model.From this I found the update utility and supporting file on the IBM site.I just went through the same thing with a different IBM mother board I have and it worked great.I found that you have to keep the same model and machine type when you do the update.Sorry for the long delay haven't been on the computer for a while

Man, you need to be more specific, I downloaded the Gigabyte stuff and was like what is this guy talking about!! Then I tried the other two links and felt stupid . This however did not work for me since I had already flashed the bios with the windows utility and changed the model type. So when I pulled it up with bios agent, it gave me what I changed it to. Any other suggestions?!!! The IBM people are checking into it, hopefully I will hear something soon from them.

If you have a recovery jumper or a clear cmos jumper or a safe jumper try setting them.It should reset the cmos to the original IBM as sold settings.Then try using the bios agent to see if it did.If so use the info from it to get the lastet on the IBM site Good Luck

Just an update. We had to get new boards. Nothing worked. The FRU of the replacement boards were 24P5565. They worked like a charm.

Having the same issues here, got one of these boards (indeed it is a rebadged Gigabyte) and cannot flash the bios with the IBM tools. It says 0 - Unknown Flash ID.

I looked up the manual for the Gigabyte board and noticed that on their version, the FWH Protect jumper is a 3 pin affair. I am wondering if this is part of the issue, it is possible that on the 2-pin version there is no pullup resistor and so the bios chip is always locked.

Hawk88 - on your new boards that flashed fine, is JP24 two pins, or 3 ?

Not sure. I sent the old board back and the new board is in the field now and no longer at my location. Sorry.

Hello. I have been trying for quite a while to update the BIOS on my IBM Aptivas. I have about 50 of them and wanted to change the logo and support newer processors. Well I tried everything the orignal poster mentioned, including jumper changes and uniflash. Nothing worked. Finally I used an old BIOS update and the applied no problem.

So I have IBM Aptiva 2194-440 with US BIOS. Using BIOS version PTKT10A and PTKT18A worked, but PTKT21A doesn't. Even after upgrading the BIOS I still can't get to the latest version or use uniflash.

i had same issue but now i resolved it. Board is Gigabyte but bios is IBM and chipset is intel810E.
solution is that below.

download bios from ibm site but don't dowmload latest bios. Download bios third last one onle and update bios from floppy drive.

for example if bios update has five version like this.

1- 2000
2- 2001
3- 2002
4- 2003
5- 2004

so you have to download and use only 2002 version of bios. it will work fine.

I second the previous answer: don't use the lastest BIOS, at least to begin with.

I have a Netvista model 6269 board which came with BIOS ptkt08A, and always showed an error and went through a BIOS menu at startup: quite annoying. This BIOS can only be updated from a boot disk. Additionnaly the board misses jumper JP24 which made me fear it the flash was locked.

The latest BIOS update disk version ptkt21a always signaled an error after booting, but I tried the oldest one available on IBM/Lenovo site (the one built by the ptjt18a.exe program), and it worked flawlessly on the first run. After I upgraded to ptkt20a. I then tried the ptkt21a again, but the boot disk version always signaled an error, and the OS version did not include the appropriate localization files (french).

So I re-flashed ptkt20a but this time with a US localization, re-launched the ptkt21a OS version (the one installed by the pt1z21usa.exe installer), and it worked fine this time. Afterwards the system booted fine too.

It looks like the latest version (ptkt21a) has been badly packaged, It's too bad they didn't do a newer one that fix these problems.

Here is what I did. I downloaded both the ptjt20a.exe and ptjt21a.exe. First I created a boot disk of the 21a then copied all the files except for the . sf file to a folder on the desktop. Then I created a boot disk of the 20a image. Then using the disk just created (20a) I copied $IMAGEPT.USF, 068A, 0683, 0665, 0681and 0686 from the 21a folder I created on my desktop. Booted up with that disk select 1 for US and it flashed fine. Looks like there might be a problem with the flash2.exe file on the 21a disk.