BIOS Updates forum

Hi !

I have a difficult problem i need help with; i flashed my new Gigabyte Ga-7va motherboard with Ga-7vax bios,yes very stupid ...
System boots to windows but ex FLOPPY(grr) dont work,but all Hdds and cds works,and BIOS is now flash protected since it seems to be default for Ga-7vax board,and i dont have that option in my Ga-7va board to enable/disable protection so i cant lock it up. If it was not locked i could have flashed in windows with @bios flash utility wich i flashed with first time,but now when i flash it looks alright but when i restart the 7vax.f6 bios remains...

I tried with flash860.exe but it tells me ex that flash part and flash rom not supported and finally " make sure your bios is availiable".
I get to dos by putting in a WinME cd and another cd with flash program+bios.
Since my floppy is not working no more i guess i cant use uniflash ?

My bios is not removable from mainboard so i cant hotswap or use "bios savior".

But if there is a command i can use toghether with flash program so it ignores flash protection or in some other way can flash my system,PLEASE tell me how.

Edit ; bios is AWARD bios

Is that AMI BIOS? If yes, try the Ctrl+Home method (see the FAQ) - but as the BIOS is for wrong board, it's possible that it will not read from floppy.
Get another HDD and make it bootable (DOS/Win9X DOS mode). Then put GigaByte's universal flashing utility, the correct BIOS and UniFlash there. Boot from the HDD and try flashing using GigaByte's utility. If it fails, try UniFlash.

But i can access dos by a Win98 cd or winme cd,but problem is that flash is rejected because of flash protection, or do u mean that the flash program can work better when booting from a empty hdd ?,and how do i make hdd bootable,by format c: /s ?
What i can read out of the uniflash is that it cannot work if a file called "himen" or so is loaded,which it is when i boot from cd,but maybe that file is not loaded when booting from hdd ??

The bios is AWARD

UniFlash can work when HIMEM.SYS is loaded. You can use any HDD with DOS/Win9x already installed - if you hold F8 when Starting Windows 95... appears, you can then select "Safe Mode Command Prompt Only" in the bootmenu which is same as booting from clean boot disk.

This is probably a dumb idea but can't you create a cd bootable and put the bios files on the cdrom and just run it when it boots from cd? Maybe your motherboard even has a web flash utility and since everything works maybe you can go online and check on that? probably dumb ideas though so sorry for wasting your time

jlee wrote:This is probably a dumb idea but can't you create a cd bootable and put the bios files on the cdrom and just run it when it boots from cd?

That depends on the flash utility - some won't work if the medium is write protected, even though you don't want to save.

UniFlash should work.

NICKs wrote:That depends on the flash utility - some won't work if the medium is write protected, even though you don't want to save..

I'm seriously questioning if you are trying to be helpful or just trying to show off what you know... Since he only has a problem with the floppy it is a simply matter to move/copy the file from the cd to the hard drive and flash the bios that way.

You may try older versions of award bios like 3.2 or 5.2. I can remember hotflashing by booting from an award bios chip, removing the chip and flashing the ami bios chip using the award flasher quite successfully. What award bios flash version are you using?

jlee wrote:I'm seriously questioning if you are trying to be helpful or just trying to show off what you know... Since he only has a problem with the floppy it is a simply matter to move/copy the file from the cd to the hard drive and flash the bios that way.

True - I thought you were suggesting he ran the whole thing from bootable CD - if you review what you wrote, you didn't mention copying to HDD before running.

The problem is that bios is protected,not that floppy is dead,i tried to flash from cd rom but no success

Maybe not the place to put this, but maybe the *Experts* can make a help file on some of this stuff... like "BIOS Flash Protection"... so we all have a better understanding of how this all works... and put it in the "Collected Wisdom" section...

Baboon wrote:The problem is that bios is protected,not that floppy is dead,i tried to flash from cd rom but no success

What error did you get when flashing from CD ? Did you copy the files to HDD first ? Some utilities will not flash if the file is write protected.

The Uniflash documentation mentions "Boot Block on Winbond W29C020 can be flashed even if the Boot Block protection is enabled on the chip - AMIFLASH v8.15.02 can do it but UniFlash can't". Maybe you could find and try this version as it seems to do some things which other versions cannot.