Almost fixed but not quite

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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meangreenie
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Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:31 am

Hi, my first post, Apologies for it being a cry for help.


Ok I' start with how I managed to bork the bios in the first place.

I have a 'MSI K7N2-Dela L' and wanted to boot from a sata drive using a cheap 'Via 6421a' controller card. I couldn't find a way with the bios settings to make this happen and read about intergrating the sata cards bios into the main motherboard bios. So I used 'Award-edit' to intergrate the 'Via 6421' bios into the MSI one. I had to delete NV2pxe.nic (i think it was called that) to make room for the sata bios which i added as an oem bios. I beleived the .nic file was just for booting off the network port.

Anyway flashed away and needless to say got a 'checksum error' and the 'boot-block' recovery screen came up. Unfortunatly after many many attempts at repairing with a floppy drive and many disks I could not get the recovery to work. It would start reading the floppy and after @10 seconds or less the drive would stop responding and just show the green read light indefinately.

So in the end I hot flashed with an 'Asrock AliveN6G-DVI' board. I had many attemps where the flash would go to start after using the /F (force)command, but would wait indefinately with a 'please wait message'

In the end I got this command to work 'awdflash bios.bin /qi /f' ...so I thought i was in the clear, popped the bios chip back into the 'msi k7n2-delta-L' and it booted just fine, went into the settings and changed everything to how i liked it and saved and rebooted. Unfortuantely after the mem count/ide detection routine the screen just goes blank with a flashing cursor in the top left. No amount with fiddiling with the boot order will make any difference, whatever i set it to boot from results in the same behaviour... 'the blank screen with the flashing cursor' when it should start booting from a drive, the 'F8' boot menu key now does nothing too.

Does anyone know what i could try next ?

..summary

1) bios 'seems' fine as the boot up seems normal and i can enter the bios setup and save settings

2) the screw up in the first place seems to be caused by me trying to intergrate a sata6421 bios into the main bios.

3) drives are detected by the bios OK, but after the memcount/ide detection routine which works clearly, the computer just jumps to a blank screen with flashing cursor.
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