BIOS Updates forum

I was having some issues with a Soyo SY-6BE+ mobo so I flashed the Bios to the latest revision, carefully following Soyo's online instructions. The Award utility indicated that the flash was successful and it came back up fine on reboot, resolving the issues, but now I just get a black screen when I restart Win2k.

If I unplug the machine's power to shut it down and then plug it back in I can reboot OK. It will continue to boot fine from that point if I only choose "Shut Down" and then turn the machine back on, but boot hangs if I choose "Restart". I tried clearing the CMOS and reloading defaults but it didn't help. APM is enabled (system CPU is a PIII 450).

I wonder if the reason this happened was because I backed up the old Bios using it's actual name, "BE+_20A1.bin", instead of naming it something like "oldbios.bin"(?) (the new flashed file was 6BEP2DA1.bin). The old file wasn't actually written to a back-up, so SOMETHING must have gone wrong...

I have tried reflashing the Bios, but now I just get an "Unknown Flash Type!" error message. BTW, the boot-up screen shows the correct Bios version as per the flash update. I'm thinking the Bios might be damaged, but I'm also wondering if re-installing Windows 2000 is worth a try before condemming it.

Any suggestions are appreciated...

Check whether the new BIOS version enables by default a BIOS Flash protection option (BIOS setup). If this is so, it may be normal to get that "Unknown Flash Type" message.

No, there is no protection option in the BIOS setup.

Where did you get the Unknown Flash warning from ? Displayed by the Award Flashprog or is it displayed during boot-up ?

To answer that last question, the error message was displayed by the Award flash utility. If anyone is still curious, I ended up having to buy a new BIOS chip to remedy this problem. I purchased it for around $20 from Ebay seller "biosdepot", whom I highly recommend.

For those who experience relatively minor problem(s) with your system, I would strongly suggest that you DO NOT FLASH THE BIOS! The risk that something will go wrong is just too high.

You should have used Uniflash with the -force command and the 4-digit number matching your flashrom type. This often helped removing this error.

I found the way to know the 4 digit ID Stamp... The problem is that this model of BIOS does not appear in the chiplist...

The model is MX29F002NTPC-12

The closest I see is MX29F002(N)T

I tried force flashing with that code, but it gave me errors....

Is there a way I can find the 4 digit for my Bios model?

Thanks