Re: BIOS upgrades - reflashing the BIOS

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Lil' Dave wrote:
"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23Ofly3$gIHA.6032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Just spent an "interesting" (to put it mildly!) weekend on this project
with the other computer, to enable a microprocessor upgrade. I wouldn't
recommend it for the faint-hearted, suffice it to say, or you might end
up
with a paperweight. :-)

You know, it wouldn't be quite so bad, except that in some cases, there
is
no reverse path available (i..e, it's a one way trip) - which seems
unforgiveable, on their part!

My question is: why do these BIOS manufacturers sometimes make it so
damn
difficult to upgrade/downgrade or go back to a previous version
(especially when going from one manufacturer to one its subsidiaries, or
vice versa (like Dell and Intel)?

And not only that, but even block certain upgrades with certain chips,
just out of self-centered arrogance on their part (and not due to real
chip limitations)?

All the motherboards I've dealt with have had an Award bios on them. I've
never run into the discrepancies you're speaking of as a result of an
attempted bios flash. The option to save the current bios to floppy has
been around for a long, long time.

AMI and (now) Intel BIOS, over here. But no, they don't ALL have that
option, sad to report.

And it's even been documented on some of the forums (I found out later) that
some of these BIOS "upgrades" (esp. to a different manufacturer), are
one-way journeys -once you do it, you can't go back (due to some of the code
in the BIOS installer).

But at one point I actually tried to, by using a Hex Editor to change some
specific bytes in the BIOS exe installer (discovered this proposed
workaround solution on another forum), but it was still a no-go.

Trust me, there apparently are a LOT of variations and eccentricities in
this BIOS arena, and it seems I've only discovered the tip of the iceberg,
at least from what I can tell. But it is fascinating (when it's not hair
raising)

Paramount to flashing the bios in my learning experiences was setting the
bios settings to default both before and after the flash. Perhaps,
clearing
the cmos from time to time as well.

That all was with single bios chip configurations.

My current dual bios chip configuration on my current motherboard makes
all
of that so much easier in the case of a botched bios flash. Also using
Award bios.

--
Dave

My vote in this primary was for the lesser
of many evils...


.

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