Failed BIOS Upgrade - Not yet rebooted.

kentuckyfrier · Sun May 03, 2009 2:55 am

Please help!
I tried to flash the bios on my ASUS P4B-MX motherboard using the ASUS Update utility running under XP. I did make a backup of the old bios before doing so, but the update keeps failing.
I am scared to turn the power off because I feel the eprom has been wiped and won't reboot.

Any tips?

Thanks in advance
Ken

kentuckyfrier · Mon May 04, 2009 10:13 am

Well I was hoping to get at least 1 reply.
Looks like this is going in the .BIN

Mon May 04, 2009 12:22 pm

I am scared to turn the power off because I feel the eprom has been wiped and won't reboot.

what makes you think that?

kentuckyfrier · Fri May 08, 2009 5:29 am

edwin wrote: what makes you think that?

The first step in flashing the bios is to clear the rom.
The second part is to reprogram the rom with new data.
Here is where it fails.

Before I did this I saved the old rom. When I open this saved rom in notepad you can see the data (a lot of gibberish).
After trying and failing to flash the bios I can also save the contents of the rom. When I view this file in notepad I see that is made up of all the same characters (yyyyyyyyyy). This proves that the content of the rom has been erased.

Anyway the power has now been cycled and it won't reboot.
I know there may be a way to recover the bios but I don't have a PCI VGA card. Also the bios chip is soldered and not easily replaced.

I now have a better M/B complete with latest bios which I flashed using a bootable floppy. No more windows based bios upgrades for me.

Fri May 08, 2009 1:39 pm

hmm yeah maybe there's a recovery method for it, you could email asus tech support and ask them, at the same time report your issue...