Sapphire 4870 wont boot.

[plythus]

I had purchased a ati sapphire 4870 512mb GDDR5 more a year ago. My system used to run fine, and had no real problems. Somewhere bout 6 months ago, i started facing problems that when i played games like UT3 or games of similar caliber, the graphic drivers would die down on me, and sometimes i would recieve an error message saying that the same had happened. I faced a similar problem when playing not-so-graphic demanding games like World of Warcraft, i would face random disconnects, and if i was multi-tasking on the pc, the system would hang or i would get a message saying my graphic drivers had stopped responding. As this became increasingly frustrating, i searched all over the internet for a solution to the problem, and finally happened to stumble across a post in a forum of someone saying that they had found a way to fix my kind of problem, and it was a patch from ATI that requires a firmware flashing to solve the problem. I tried it out and it worked like a charm, till yesterday. 2 days ago i got a hit by a really bad virus and my system had to be formatted and win xp reinstalled. I noticed that i started facing problems again with relation to my drivers. Thinking that the patch had somehow been linked with win xp, i tried to install the firmware flash again. This time i received a blue screen and i was forced to manually shut down my system. Now my graphic card wont boot up.
Is there anything that can be done to solve my problem

 

[evongugg]

Zero out the drive with dBan. Reinstall the operating system.
Put another video card in the system. It could be a PCI card if you have no other video card port and reflash the video card.

 

[plythus]

i managed to solve the problem with some help from ATI....tyey asked me to make a bootable USB stick along with the correct bios and a software called atiflash. Then i flashed my gc and its alive

 

[daedalus685]

Your warranty is void since you flashed it, so you ahve to fix it yourself.

Never ever flash in windows. It can be done, but it is too easy for it to crash and to brick your card. Much much safer to do it off a dos boot disk.

Make a USB stick bootable, go to techpowerup and download atiflash, and the correct bios. Place both on a bootable USB stick (or CD, or floppy, whatever).

Place an old video card in the system with the now bricked card. The only way to fix it is to flash it with a new bios, which is easy enough once you get the video from some other video card.

With a video signal on the old/replacement card simply boot to dos, run atiflash (make sure to point it at the correct port or you will brick the replacement card too ). It is entirely recoverable from, but you should never ever flash a card unless you are sure it is required and have a backup incase the flash fails.

Also, unless it is a really clever virus it shoudln't be able to change the information in the GPU bios, more likely it borked your drivers. I don't think the flash was required. While some issues may be bios related it is not common, more likely you have a driver issue causing the problem.

A bios flash should be done only if you are certain what you are doing and willing to void the warranty, or instructed to by tech support affiliated with the card manufacturer.

****EDIT, Too late for my post . Congrats on fixing the issue. Cheers.****