Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R BIOS erased by @BIOS utility

[Ben74]

beware of gigabyte's @BIOS utility for updating your bios from windows. i installed vista 32 with a raid 0 array on my new GA-P35-DS3R. everything went fine. i installed all the updates from windows update. things were looking good, except it was having trouble rebooting. shutdown and cold boot was fine, but rebooting caused it to hang while loading windows. i figured a bios update was in order. i installed @BIOS, used the autodownload feature, and chose the latest bios from the american server (version F11). it went to work, but after it erased the bios memory, it hung for maybe 10 minutes. finally, without any input from me, it appeared to attempt to roll back the changes. it was unsuccessful, and gave me an error which i don't recall exactly but something to the effect of "memory unwritable". unsure of what really happened, i decided to reboot and try to update the bios using qflash. upon reboot, the system turned on momentarily, then turned off. a second later, it tried to start again. this time it gave me two beeps (CMOS error) and it showed the boot block screen that said something like "searching hard drive for bios". this showed on the screen for maybe 2 seconds, then the system reboots again and repeats the cycle. according to gigabyte's website, this behavior indicates that both copies of the bios in the "dual bios" are corrupted, and the mobo is looking for a backup copy of the bios that may have been saved to a hidden partition on the hard drive. this didn't work for me, perhaps because of the raid 0 array. i tried inserting the mobo driver CD, a burnt CD with the bios file on it, a floppy with the bios on it, a USB flash drive with the bios on it, a different SATA hard drive with the bios on it, a different IDE drive with the bios on it, and various bootable floppies and CDs (tried holding down ctrl-home too). nothing worked. the bios is completely hosed, and there seems to be no way to fix it. you can't even replace the bios chips on these boards, because they're soldered on. this is extremely stupid. i contacted gigabyte support through their website yesterday, but have gotten no reply. from what i've read around the forums, i shouldn't expect to get one. i sent the board back to newegg today. hopefully they'll replace it. moral of the story: don't use @BIOS, and stay away from gigabyte if you're smarter than me...

 

[ZozZoz]

Don't bash Gigabyte, there's probably a 100 to 1 ratio of good vs. bad experiences with their products.
The real moral is (stated more than once by hardware manufacturers regarding BIOS updates) - if it ain't broke - don't fix it. Firmware update is always a gamble, whether its BIOS or your cellphone's firmware, 100% success rate is not guaranteed.

 

[Ben74]

my complaints against gigabyte are 1) bad customer service 2) crappy @BIOS software. i'm not "bashing" them just because i got "unlucky". i think i have legitimate reason to be unhappy. if you disagree, that's fine, but don't make me out to be a whiner.

 

[levicki]

Ben74 is right here, Gigabyte support is next to non-existent (and so is Asus'), and I keep telling people do not use Windows flash utilities.