PCTech Forums

His BIOS that is.... on his PC....

I'd never flashed a BIOS before so I wasn't so sure of myself at first.

I needed to do this because he originally had a single core AMD socket 939 and today he bought a dual core for £15, the exact same one I paid £350 for over 4 years ago :(
Problem was the BIOS didn't recognise the CPU and thought it was only a single core.

The first hurdle I hit was that the instructions said to make a bootable floppy disk. I didn't think I had any left so I started looking for alternatives. I'd heard/read somewhere that you can boot from a USB in a similar manner, but after looking it up the instructions on how to make one were 'make a bootable floppy then copy the files across...'. Not good.

Eventually I found some floppies tucked away in the corner of my desk. Relief. Even so, what on earth would I have done had I no floppies? They're practically extinct now and most new PCs/laptops don't have floppy drives. What would they do?

I formatted one and made it bootable then added the BIOS flashing software and the latest BIOS, both of which I found on the official website for his mobo. Flashing went smoothly and error free.

Booted the PC again, worked fine, went into BIOS options, saw it had correctly recognised the CPU, save, exit.

It got as far as the windows logo with the blue loading bar, the blue bar scrolled half way along, auto reboot. Bad times.

It wasn't a one off either, it did the same thing a few times in a row. Went back into the BIOS to make sure everything was ok and changed the RAM timing from 'manual' with some random values :S to 'auto'.

Loaded to windows :D

Then the 'new hardware found' came up for just about everything installed in his PC. DVD drive, network drivers, sound drivers, the lot! After all that I open task manager and it still only has one graph, one CPU. Couldn't change the view since I thought it could have defaulted to 'one graph, all CPUs'. It still only saw one CPU.

So, I just reboot again to see what difference it makes, and it makes all the difference. Task manager shows 2 graphs.

So I'm a lil happy as I've just completed my first successful CPU upgrade and BIOS flash :D

as this topic is up and going, what happens with a bios flash fail? Are we talking big paper weight?

is it worth updating? id be dead worried of ruining it for no reason.

well damn.... wish I'd know about that sooner liljim :(
I'll blame the asus website for not having anything like that mentioned. Certainly makes a BIOS flash seem much less scary.

Venney, all is not lost. But I expect it would vary from case to case. Even so buying a whole new mobo may not be .
I had to update it in my bro's PC since it wasn't familiar with the new CPU I slapped in. If everything's working fine there wouldn't be much point in flashing it.

Still, it's probably one of the easiest ways to bork your PC. Hence why I'm glad I didn't :D

reading both those posts makes me think i could not do either (apart from a new bios chip, that sounds pretty easy).

I dont think im ever going to do a flash, certainly not on this pc!

flashes arent bad by any means anymore. theres nothing to fear now with crash free chips out. They are set now that even if u lose power in the middle of a flash it will revert back on its own or sometimes a hotkey will revert it back and your fixed. Older machines however, yea paper weight is possible. The worth is also about the fix, bios updates are just like software patches. You dont get a new machine out the deal but it might fix a bug that you were having trouble from so the best thing is to read the release notes and see what the update addresses before you do it. I dont update mine just for the hell of it, i dont really do drivers that way either though. When i run into an issue then i update or whatever is needed at the time. It might be bad practice but im more of a "if it aint broke dont fix it" (say it with cajun accent) kinda guy. Dont get me wrong, i do security and virus updates though...just want to keep that clear..lol.

lol when i was reading your post i diddnt even consider virus updates but if you read it again without your end bit lol!

not as impressive... but i just flashed my dvd drive

Now it copies +R dvds

The firmware update you just done is pretty much the same method as newer bios updates. Nothing to it.

Fair point. I rmbr I had to update a CD drive because it would spin up, run an autostart on the disk, spin down, repeat.
I'd end up with 20 autostarts all trying to read from the disk and and increasing.

Thinking of ways it could go wrong, you'd either have to be really unlucky and get a powercut mid flash, or try to flash it with the wrong update.

I'd expect there to be measures in place to prevent the second, and it took me less than 30 seconds so the chances are very slim.