Booting from usb to flash bios

[DMaarten]

Problem!

I updated my Bios with an Uber bios from this forum. It worked, and rebooted. Here's the problem: My computer won't boot from my SATA drive anymore!!

I want to boot back to the official bios from asus and have a theory, and want to run it past you guys.

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe is the mobo
I don't have a floppy drive ( i do, but it doesn't work
Don't have a USB stick
I DO have a mp3 player that I can hook up on my USB drive

Can I put the bootimage and program (ADWflash of something) on my mp3 player,
let the comp boot from the usb and reflash it with the original bios from asus?

And how do I do this?

[humeyboy]

I had issues with any 1013 bios, offical or modded with my Maxtor Diamondmax 10, I swapped to WD Raptors anyhow so not a issue now.

I advise you google the usb boot part as its not easy on these mobos, you need mess with files and set some settings for usb keyboard support, also any PC can be made to boot to usb even a old one that has no bios options but again its a lot of work to make the bootable usb device work, you end up with a new option if you press F8 at startup with the latter method.

[DMaarten]

I did google, but it's all so confusing, can't someone put a simple list of steps and downloads links here?

[DMaarten]

Or does someone have an bootable usb stick and is willing to host a zip with the files so I can copy them?

[humeyboy]

It is that, best buy a 4 buck's FDD and connect as needed with side of case removed, its not as if you flash Mobo or GPU bios every week.

[UDF2Diablo]

i flashed my previos mobo once and something bad happened... because the pc would turn on but nothing would show on the screen, no post, no beeps nothing...

but i noticed the floppy drive light would flash for a couple seconds whenever i turn the pc on ...

so i downloaded another bios and put it on the floppy, i then put my boot floppy in the drive, turned the pc on and the floppy drive started reading!

waited till the light went off, blind-typed in the command to force a bios flash and hit enter... floppy started reading again, waited a few seconds, pc restarted itself and voila!! it posted! wahahahaha...

that day, i was very proud of myself.

- erm, post might not have been relevent, but i just wanted to reminice ;(

[humeyboy]

You can make a auto.bat so you dont need work blind.

[speculatrix]

greetings, nforcers!

A few weeks ago a SMART error was reported on one drive, so this spurred me on to upgrade, I bought a couple of 1TB drives - Western Digital Green Power with 32MB cache. When I connect one of these to the SATA controller, it hangs at the S-Image drive status report during boot. I tried the SATA enable jumper on the motherboard but it really does disable SATA altogether, not just the BIOS, so that didn't help.

The SiliconImage website didn't help, and my bios was up to date with the latest on Asus's site. Bummer! Then, after some googling, I came across this forum and the new bios, so I thought I was on to a winner! Not so quick, things were not going well.

When I tried the BIOS built-in flasher, it reported an error with the UBER bios file and locked up leaving the floppy light on. When I try booting DOS from an old win95 boot/rescue, it also locks up with floppy light off. In both cases I needed to hard reset. I tried turning BIOS cache off, an old trick, no effect.

Meanwhile, I am now about to try the "flashrom" program from the linux flashing tool part of coreboot.org (formerly linuxbios.org). It read the old BIOS no problem to a file.... ok, lets get started...
Strangely, if I read the existing bios to a file, it's totally different to a downloaded copy of the official Asus bios. hmm.
Actually, I get a similar problem if I write, say, TRATS bios and read it back, the results are different. If I use the "-v" option thus "flashrom -v TRATS2TCOFF.BIN", it says FAILED; if I compare with "cmp", it says "differ: byte 21846, line 1". Ah, maybe I should "flashrom -E" to erase first. No, it still fails verify, at exactly the same point, that's 21K into the bios file, which isn't very far.

Now I'm deadly scared of rebooting my machine. Arrrggghhhhhh!

the background story.... I have a home file server with mirrored Seagate 200GB drives which I am trying to upgrade to a pair of 1TB drives. I am using an A7N8X-E Deluxe with an Athlon Barton XP2500+ and 1GB of memory; I *underclock* it to save power, getting power consumption down to about 110W or so. I'm running linux on it and it doesn't have windows installed at all. I'm not using the fakeraid provided by the Si3112 bios, linux sees two separate drives and uses software mirroring. It was all perfect until I decided to upgrade...