I need to do a bios upgrade for my motherboard.

Imm not sure wether this will affect my warranty on the board before I go ahead and do it.

Also Ive never done it before and heard it can go horribly wrong and most of the time there unsucessful.

If you follow the instuctions exactly, it will be succesful, however if you mess up the installation, yes it can go wrong.
I suggest you ask someone who is familiar with this operation to be on the safe side.

Ive just been looking on the manufacturers website and it says if it goes wrong its void, so does that mean if it is succesful my mobo still has a valid warranty.

The procedure sounds easy enough but its all the big bold warning signs and the bad things Ive heard from others experiences thats making me think twice. So id like to find out what sort of things could go wrong before i doit as its an important upgrade that needs to be done.

its a via kt400 chipset Ive just read something that says that motherboards that use a via chipset should disable Byte Merge otherwise the bios will die Is there any other issues like this i should know of?

Just one more question how realiable is bios recovery?

well not to put you off but i flashed my old gigabyte board loads of times (i kept flashing between two bios versions - reasons i can't remember), and on about te 15th time it was dead - killed the bios chip. shame cuase it was a damn good board i thought.

Well, unless you have a board with DualBIOS(Gigabyte boards, which allow you to switch to a back-up BIOS so you can ref-flash the other one), BIOs recovery means either replacing the BIOS(if socketed) or well, getting a new board, because replacing a soldered BIOS isn't very cost-effective.

Go ahead and flash it. There is almost no way for the retailer to really tell between a BIOS flash gone wrong and a BIOS that simply failed on it's own. If something goes wrong during the BIOS flash just tell them it malfunctioned on it's own and use the warranty.

Hmmmm.... QWERTY, I feel there is a way to find out a wrong flash, if at all they checked the chip. EPROM reader can certainly tell what was wrong and at which point. I have seen it before in ICL's Computer manufacturing division here in India (ICIM).

UK_trader, its better to be safe than sorry. Mail them and ask about the exact terms. For the simple reason that those "risky" terms differ from company to company.

i was going to flash the bios on my p3 but changed my mind as i dont wanna kill my board. best to pay around 25-30 notes and get it done by the experts.regards

Of course it will effect the warranty. It will void it. However as long as you are absolutely positive that you have the correct update, I would say go for it. Just be extremely careful(even anally so) and you will more than likely be okay. I've updated the bios on my family's board a few years back without any hitches. However I was very careful and really didn't know fully what I was doing at the time. :laugh:

It's not all that hard, I just did it on a Piece of Crap pcchips board about 10 minutes ago, and no probs (didn't fix my original prob though). The pcchips website has absolutely NO instructions and I still got it done, of course I'd done it on other boards, but really it's not all that hard

Originally posted by MasterMind
Hmmmm.... QWERTY, I feel there is a way to find out a wrong flash, if at all they checked the chip. EPROM reader can certainly tell what was wrong and at which point. I have seen it before in ICL's Computer manufacturing division here in India (ICIM).

UK_trader, its better to be safe than sorry. Mail them and ask about the exact terms. For the simple reason that those "risky" terms differ from company to company.


In real life, most retailers\stores DO NOT have the facilities or ability to verify a BIOS. They simply return it to the manufacturer...

I worked in the CA Bay area in a Surface Mount manufacturing facility. By the time the board got back to us it didn't matter what originally was wrong with it since the customer would already have a replacement. The boards simply got repaired\replaced\scrapped. It's not cost effective to actually test each and every returned board on a eprom reader just to verify if the customer did something stupid..

Uhmm, I dont really know what the problem is flashing the BIOS,yes it does seem daunting at first but follow the instructions and you can't really go wrong. Make a bootable floppy download the appropriate BIOS ROM update together with the flash utility like AWFlash or AMIFlash etc,Boot the system and start the flash utility,read any instructions carefully from the manufacturer and print them out prior to flashing if you need to.

Just a couple of further points,try and use a 'brand new' floppy disc as the last thing you want is to get 2/3rd's of the way through and get a read error from the floppy disc,secondly,pray that you dont get a power cut :D I've experienced a power cut during a LiteOn CDRW firmware flash :(

As QWERTY states it's very unlikely that the mobo manufacturer will bother with a board that will probably cost them next to nothing to repair or even write it off completely.

Good luck with the flash

Smiffy

Originally posted by QWERTY
There is almost no way for the retailer to really tell between a BIOS flash gone wrong and a BIOS that simply failed on it's own.

Sorry.... but my reply was for the above lines from your earlier post. Whether a crap retailer is having a facility to test the actual EEPROM or not is a different issue. Thanks!!

Well I flashed it, it seemed to go ok and I can enter the bios and make changes but the pc wont boot, Im using my old one rght now.

It gets to the memory check I get ok and nothing, but it was doing this before the bios update, but Id hit reset and it would be ok but when I do it now it just hangs and I have to switch it on and off then the same.

I just set optimal settings for the bios any ideas why its not booting.

I would double check all the settings for your drives in the bios as they are what is being checked when the computer seems to hang.

I cant even get into the bios now, but last time I did my hd is ok but one of the original problems was my cd and dvd writers not been detected properly and was still the same. And the detecting ide devices doesent even get chance to come up on the screen.

Would clearing the cmos help?

The bios upgrade worked anyhow because one of the fixes has been fixed the system clock wouldnt go to 2003 but it will now.

Well I got it sorted it was the pci graphics card I was using that the bios upgrade didnt like.