Question on mis-flashing BIOS.

Hi all,

I have a question here, on my sister's Epox board (EP-3VCA2), there's a better way to automatically flash the BIOS without having to boot from a diskette, and that is just by pressing ALT-F2 during the POST.

Anyway, we could never deny that its a risky thing to do, and for an event such as a power failure occurs during the FLASHing process. We could end up with a dead board.

My question is for Epox boards and I hope, for all recent boards.

Aside from the Dual BIOS found on some very few boards, how do recent motherboards deal with BIOS mis-flash? What are the consequences of a mis-flashed BIOS? What are the solutions?

I am asking this, kasi I have heard, on some Epox boards have automatic recovery feature (not Dual BIOS) in which in an event of a BIOS mis-flash, the computer won't boot but instead will automatically look for a disk in the floppy drive containing the BIOS file. I forgot what boards support this feature or is it really a reality with Epox boards.

I hope you could enlighten me more about this topic.

My Abit KG7-RAID manual says the following:

'During the updating, the progress will be measured by white blocks. The last four blue blocks of the flash update process represent the "BIOS boot block". The BIOS boot block is used to prevent the BIOS from becoming corrupt during programming. It should not be programmed every time. If this "BIOS boot block" remains intact when the BIOS becomes corrupt during programming, then you can boot from a bootable floppy netxt time you boot your computer. This allows you to flash your BIOS again without the need for technical support from the dealer'

Hope this gives some info.

My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground .

I just don't know tho if it applies to newer boards that don't have ISA slots, like the Epox 8KHA+

My board uses an Award BIOS.

The manual of my board doesn't state anything about that. But it does include steps in flashing the BIOS, but it only covers flashing from a floppy disk (not by pressing alt-f2).

:-(

according to msi`s website....

For Award BIOS:

Make a bootable floopy disk
Copy the Award flash utility & BIOS file to the said floppy disk
Create an autoexec.bat with "awdfl535 biosfilename" in the content e.g. awdfl535 a619mj21.bin

Boot up system with the said floppy (it will take less than 2 minutes before screen comes out)

Re-flash the BIOS & reboot.

And while we are on this subject it is possible to reprogram a ami bios to award and vice versa.

Another Cookie? Who is going to pay my dentist bill?

HUH? NO, you totally misunderstood. You can take say old rom that is labeled ami and flash an award bios to it, say for instance your fried your new motherboard which happens to have an award bios, you can remove a rom from another board that has an ami bios and flash it with the award bios, or you could do this same procedure just to make a backup. Moral of the story, before you throw away that old dead motherboard, save the rom.

Another Cookie? Who is going to pay my dentist bill?