NEED HELP WITH GATEWAY SOLO 9500!!!

Hot-swapping and Boot-Block flash & Boot block flash and floppy support
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fastsally
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Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2004 1:26 am

Hi,
I could really use some help. My notebook floppy drive died in the middle of flashing the bios, I could recover the corrupt bios if I had the rom or bin file. Gateway uses a single file bios flash utility I've looked everywhere for the .bin with no luck, so I downloaded the single file bios from gateway, File analysis says it's an MZ dos file. Could this be decompiled to get the rom file??? I also have access to another identical laptop (same make,model,M/B, everything) Could I save that bios and flash the non working one?
Thanks,
Sally
dos-freak
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OK, i downloaded one of these .exe files and recognised, that there seems to be a 512 K flash ROM. I analysed the header of these flash .exe Files and the bios flash-routine seems to be 1 segment (64k) and the rest of 512k is the BIOS .bin file, I think.
So you just have to strip the first 64k of the .exe File and it results in results in the .bin file. To acomplish this job, i wrote a little utility.
Please try the following (I cannot guaratee that it will work, but you may give it a try):

1. Download my utility http://dose.0wnz.at/CUTTER.EXE
2. Save it to the directory where your Gateway bios-flasher .exe was extracted to (usually C:\cabs\somenumber\)
3. Run the utility: CUTTER biosflashfile.exe my.bin

now the my.bin should be 512K (524288 bytes) in length.
try using the my.bin als flash file.

Goot Luck!
Please give me some feedback if it works or not.
Ritchie
BIOS Guru
Posts: 761
Joined: Wed Oct 30, 2002 5:17 am

Hi Sally

What dos-freak suggested sounds like it might work, but it sounds risky at the same time. If I were doing this I would do things differently, as follows. As with does-freak's method, use my method at your own risk.

1) Are you sure the floppy DRIVE died, or was it just a bad floppy DISK?
2) If you are sure about it being the actual drive, use the floppy drive from the identical laptop.
3) Start with a known good floppy disk.
4) Use the good floppy drive with the good floppy disk on the identical laptop and carefully backup the BIOS.
5) If step 4 gives you the BIN file, then you can use the good floppy drive with the good floppy disk on the laptop with the corrupt BIOS to recover the BIOS.
6) If step 5 sucessfully recovers your BIOS, you then have the option of using the good floppy drive with a good floppy disk on the laptop with the recovered BIOS to attempt to reflash the BIOS that you were attempting to flash in the first place, which, if sucessfull, will result in your BIOS upgrade that you were originally aiming for.

Wishing you luck - hope something works!!!
acpowell
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I have a similar problem with my laptop. Does anyone know if this procedure worked... My bios is missing do to the upgrade hanging half way threw.

Thanks
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