BIOS Updates forum

My roomate tried to update the bios for his video card and now the card doesn't work.

We are looking for a way to restore the card to the previous bios rev and are uncertain if this is possible as the card is now non-functional.

We would like a link to the bios updates for this card.

Thanx

You'll need another VGA card simultaneously inserted, and hook the monitor to it. Then you can try reflashing the other one.

I have tried with an old PCI s3 card inserted. When I try to reflash the Diamond card the flasher program says that the specified hardware is not found.

However in windows the Diamond Viper v550 is found as new hardware but I can't use it (no display/ can't switch) If I take out the pci card the motherboard beeps (no video) and boots without video.

I'm not sure what else I can do

Try without the S3 card and all files needed on a Bootfloppy with autoexec.bat starting the VGA flashprog

Tried that as well and the program seems to run correctly and reboot but the video card repeats the same problem over again, motherboard beeps for no video and of coarse no video than boot.

Does anyone have the bios and flash utilities for the Diamond video card?

As I am thinking my roomate has the wrong ones. (or the card is toasted now)

Cheers

We setup a batch file to run it again but this time we put it to dump the screen data into a txt file. Anyway we forced the flash using parameters and it ended up with a lot of errors during the flash and of coarse still no video. We have tried the version written on the video card bios and the newer version and both end up with a lot of errors.

Confused

Might be time to take the EEPROM off and check it in a burner...is that possible?

The eepprom is a little tiny surface mount. We could remove it (got the tools) but I have no idea how we would adapt it to the schools eeprom burner, although I have thought about it as maybe the chip has issues.

We do have a PCB milling machine if we want to make a board/adapter but I would need to know the pinout adaption.

Cheers

I'm sure you'll find (on the net) serial EEPROM programming circuit diagrams that you can drive from the PC - my brother has made up a few for different chips as he worked for a car audio place at one time, and they use serial eeproms for their station and security info.
A Google search turned up this, for example:
http://www.vk2zay.net/eeprom-programmer.html
although that has Linux drivers

Try a different flash program - maybe your program looks for a diamond card and if it does not find a diamond card it won't flash

There is one further thing I can think of but it is risky.

I am aware of this technique for mb BIOS and see no reason why it cannot be applied to VGA BIOS.

You would find an identical card to the one with the corrupt BIOS. Then remove the BIOS chip from the good card and put it onto the card with the bad BIOS. Then power up the system to the point where you are ready to run the flash procedure. Now that the card has booted the necessary BIOS information should be in RAM. So remove the good BIOS chip (with the machine running). In theory the card and system should keep running. Then put the bad BIOS chip back in with the machine running. Then flash the BIOS. If all goes well when you reboot the card should boot from the freshly flashed now (assumed to be...) good BIOS.


This is not my technique - just one that I read about and while it may work, it is a good way to do further damage. So if you do not want to ruin anything else (which it sounds like) I would advise against it.

Ritchie wrote:There is one further thing I can think of but it is risky.

I am aware of this technique for mb BIOS and see no reason why it cannot be applied to VGA BIOS.

You would find an identical card to the one with the corrupt BIOS. Then remove the BIOS chip from the good card and put it onto the card with the bad BIOS. Then power up the system to the point where you are ready to run the flash procedure. Now that the card has booted the necessary BIOS information should be in RAM. So remove the good BIOS chip (with the machine running). In theory the card and system should keep running. Then put the bad BIOS chip back in with the machine running. Then flash the BIOS. If all goes well when you reboot the card should boot from the freshly flashed now (assumed to be...) good BIOS.

This is not my technique - just one that I read about and while it may work, it is a good way to do further damage. So if you do not want to ruin anything else (which it sounds like) I would advise against it.

These video BIOS chips are typically surface-mount soldered 8-pin Serial EEPROM. I know the original poster says that they have the technology to remove and replace the chip, but that does mean carrying out the remove and replace a total of 3 times over the two boards. I'd prefer doing it once and building a parallel port programmer.

We're giving up on this one. Since he didn't back up the original bios on the card (no option was given) I can't warrant more time on it. He decided to update the video card to a Geforce2 GTS problem solved