Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 (v1.0) problem

[jlf175]

Hi,

After downloading and installing the newest BIOS (F14) for my Gigabyte GA-P965 S3 mother board (v1.0) the system will not boot when IDE drives (a DVD-ROM and IDE Hard Drive) are connected to the system. When those are disconnected the SATA drives come up fine.

The symptom on the screen shows that the BIOS performs its POST but when the Jmicron controller screen appears the "Detecting Drives..." message appears but then the screen freezes. Normally this screen appears very quickly with a list of the drives in the machine but now it only sits there until I disconnect the IDE devices and restart.

I'm guessing that something must have happened during the BIOS flash to cause this issue. The proper course of action would be to download the BIOS from the gigabyte site and place it to a bootable floppy, correct?

If so, is it even possible to make a bootable floppy in Vista (32-bit) or do I need some other third party tools?

 

[bilbat]

You don't really need the bootable floppy (though it's a good idea to have for real disasters) - download the BIOS, which will be a self-extracting .exe file. When you run it, it will 'unzip' itself to three files:
965PDS3.F14 (the actual BIOS)
FLASHSPI.EXE (the 'flasher')
autoexec.bat ('launches' the flasher on a bootable setup)

You can simply copy the BIOS file to a floppy, and use the 'built-in-the-BIOS' flasher to load it...

If you do want to create the bootable, open My Computer, right-click on the floppy drive, select Format, leave everything at default settings, and select the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk' check-box; click start, and let 'er rip... Once your disk is formated, open it and erase everything but:
COMMAND.COM
MSDOS.SYS
then copy the three files the BIOS download 'unzipped to' onto this floppy - voila - you have a bootable BIOS flasher!

 

[jlf175]

Thank you, I will do this tomorrow once I can get a floppy drive from work (tossed mine under the naive thought of "Hey I haven't used this in probably five to ten years no sense in keeping it around!")

 

[bilbat]

Might wana read the Floppy Drives section of the 'sticky'

 

[jlf175]

Thanks for the help. I did exactly as you said and the system still would not work with IDE.

BUT, I then went to giga-byte site and there in small print under the link for the BIOS file was the following "Be sure to run the option of LOAD OPTIMIZED DEFAULTS after loading a new BIOS." Now I'm loathe to read instructions as much as the next tech nerd but I gave it a shot.

I did that and voila, it is all working again!

 

[jlf175]

Best answer selected by jlf175.

 

[bilbat]

[:bilbat:9] First section of the 'sticky':

Load Optimized
You must 'start up' your board by doing the "Load Optimized Defaults" function from the BIOS - this is not an optional step! Each time your board starts up, the BIOS begins by running a block of discovery code: it sort of 'twiddles its fingers' to see how many fingers it has, as well as which 'hand' each is on...

The BIOS' "Load" functions (Load optimized/load fail-safe) similarly do 'discovery', but they do a much more thorough job of it, querying every piece of hardware, and then 'setting' the dozens of parameters you will find in your BIOS set to 'auto'; until this is done, your board is pretty much 'brain-dead', and can not be expected to work correctly, if at all. Think of it this way: if you woke up one morning, and not only couldn't remember 'who you were', but also couldn't remember which finger was on which hand - you'd be in a world of hurt![:lectrocrew:7]