BEWARE Flashing EP35-DS3P with F4 BIOS revision!

Hi,

I downloaded and flashed my BIOS with the F4 revision from the Gigabyte website. Liked the sound of the DES Advanced features.

Used @BIOS to flash it, it worked fine, if a little slow. Rebooted and got a very loud warning sounds from overheating. Went straight into BIOS to do "Optimised Settings" and noticed CPU temps were 85 degrees, its normally around 30 at idle! This was on a stock-standard E8200 with standard cooler. I restarted and booted into windows and could hear the CPU fan at full speed just from logging on, I got scared and thought bugger this i'm going back to BIOS F3.

So i started the @BIOS Flash procedure again, and it failed to backup F4, and subsequently failed to flash to F3. Rebooted the machine and got immediate BIOS Recovery screen and the message "Searching on hard Disk for BIOS..." After an hour, this had not changed. I was in a frothing frenzy of anxiety at this point and ready to launch full scale abuse at nearest creature. (anger management issues)

After many hours of powering off/powering on, removing CMOS, cursing it, i decided to scrape the mould off the FDD in my cupboard and plug it in with an F3-loaded BIOS file. I disconnected the HDD and DVD thinking it might be better to try and force boot off the floppy, low and behold the BIOS recovery started working the moment i switched it back on!! So even though the FDD didnt even spin-up, it helped me to get this bastard machine working again by unplugging the HDD i think.

BIOS reverted back to old F1 revision, so i used QFLASH to reload F3 back on to make my E8200 work properly.

I will certainly think twice before flashing BIOS again in the future. I suggest all you DS3P owners out there to be careful!

Dave

yup, QFLASH from within Gigabyte BIOS seems much safer. So happy it was working again that i almost cried, its been a tough week!

Interesting to note that the BIOS would only start to revert to old BIOS once i had disconnected HDD. Interesting to note for future reference!

Yeah, from what you said it sounds like it will keep scouring your hard drives for a BIOS to recover with. Not really a bad feature if you keep a spare BIOS image on the disk.

The last time I used a windows based BIOS updater was with my old MSI P965 Platinum. Everything seemed to go fine until it rebooted me. It did not even post the first 3 power cycles. I was starting to get really worried until it managed to recover on the 4th boot.

My brother didn't heed my warning on this, and used Asus' Windows utility. I can't remember which model he has, but it is a newer one that supports DDR3, but didn't have Gigabyte's Dual Bios feature. He used their Windows utility and surprisingly, the program deleted the old BIOS BEFORE installing the new one (most of the time the old one is backed up until the new one is installed and verified) and then hung up during install of the new one. Needless to say he ended up having to send the board in to Asus to get a BIOS reinstalled after it was rendered inoperable. I have a Gigabyte board and only use QFlash with a USB drive. Also, if you overclock, it is best to restore settings to default before flashing to a new BIOS.