Updating Bios for K7VZA in Windows XP
Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 2:17 am
Does any one have advice on updating my bios? Here's the background. My motherboard is an ECS K7VZA with Award Bios version 3.2 and has a date of 3/14?/2001. (March of 2001 definite but not day)
The processor is an Athlon 1.4MHz w/ 512 MB RAM and I have a 40 GB hard drive with 3 partitions, all of which are NTFS formatted.
Since I have installed XP, my computer has consistently restarted at the beginning or during the installation of software I am trying to load. I recently disabled the option to restart windows after a major error occurs and this allowed me to check what is going on in the event viewer. Looking in my event viewer log I found that the error has been:
ACPI Bios is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0x71), which lies in the 0x70 - 0x71 protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance. (Sometimes the memory ranges are different but all the ones listed are on the list of protected memory that I will mention in a sec)
Going to Microsoft's site for help, I found an article that talked about how Windows XP makes certain ranges of memory protected and recommending board manufacturers take this into account.
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/onnow/BIOSAML.asp
Knowing this, I found the update for the bios that I need from the ECS website.
I have also found the WinFlash program that will run in Windows XP.
My question is, is this the proper way to go about updating the BIOS considering that Windows XP does not acknowledge the existance of DOS and won't allow me to boot from a Win 98 boot disk or a DOS disk that I made in Win XP?
If anyone has had a similar situation, is this the way to go?
Thanks for your help.
The processor is an Athlon 1.4MHz w/ 512 MB RAM and I have a 40 GB hard drive with 3 partitions, all of which are NTFS formatted.
Since I have installed XP, my computer has consistently restarted at the beginning or during the installation of software I am trying to load. I recently disabled the option to restart windows after a major error occurs and this allowed me to check what is going on in the event viewer. Looking in my event viewer log I found that the error has been:
ACPI Bios is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0x71), which lies in the 0x70 - 0x71 protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance. (Sometimes the memory ranges are different but all the ones listed are on the list of protected memory that I will mention in a sec)
Going to Microsoft's site for help, I found an article that talked about how Windows XP makes certain ranges of memory protected and recommending board manufacturers take this into account.
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/onnow/BIOSAML.asp
Knowing this, I found the update for the bios that I need from the ECS website.
I have also found the WinFlash program that will run in Windows XP.
My question is, is this the proper way to go about updating the BIOS considering that Windows XP does not acknowledge the existance of DOS and won't allow me to boot from a Win 98 boot disk or a DOS disk that I made in Win XP?
If anyone has had a similar situation, is this the way to go?
Thanks for your help.