BIOS Updates forum

Hi,

I flashed my Asus A7N8X-X with revision 1009 bios a while ago.
Recently, it's been crashing so I decided to reflash the bios and see what happens. I saved a copy of the 1009 bios already in the system before I reflashed 1009 to it.

I took the 1009 backed up from the system and compared it to the original 1009 binary that was downloaded from Asus in a hex editor. There were a number of differences!

Is the bios chip defective or what? is there something that writes to the bios that causes these changes?

It depends on what area of the BIOS you are looking at.

DMI is one area that is updated when you add/remove hardware. But when you see a difference in the bootblock, decompression block, system bios, and ACPI table then your BIOS got corrupted.

AFAIK, boards with nForce2 chipset save some settings somewhere in the BIOS area - so some other areas might differ. It's unsafe bad design which causes BIOS failures - if it hangs when saving the settings, the BIOS becomes corrupt (you get BootBlock BIOS).