On Fri, 18 May 2001 18:34:05 -0500
"Jay J" <jay-tclug at 3pound.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> We fell victim to a faulty (or incompatible) AMI BIOS flash utility
> distributed by PC-Chips, now I'm on a crusade to return this obsolete
> POS to it's somewhat-operational state.

Heh, you shouldn't need to go to any extremes for this.. if that is any
recent sort of AMI BIOS, it supports boot-block recovery mode. This is a
little-known feature that will enable you to use a floppy drive containing
a BIOS image to re-program the EEPROM, even though the board won't POST,
and seems totally dead.

Here is a detail on the procedure, good luck... this comes from
http://www.ping.be/bios aka Wim's BIOS Page:

Modern motherboards have a boot-block BIOS. This is small area of
the BIOS that doesn't get overwritten when you flash a BIOS. The
boot-block BIOS only has
support for the floppy drive. If you have a PCI video card you won't see
anything on the
screen because the boot-block BIOS only supports an ISA videocard.

Award: The boot-block BIOS will execute an AUTOEXEC.BAT file on a
bootable diskette. Copy an Award flasher & the correct BIOS *.bin file on
the floppy
and execute it automaticly by putting awdflash *.bin in the AUTOEXEC.BAT
file.

AMI: The AMI boot-block BIOS will look for a AMIBOOT.ROM file on a
diskette. Copy and rename the correct BIOS file on the floppy and power up
the PC. The
floppy doesn't need to be bootable. You will see the PC read the floppy,
after about 4
minutes you will hear 4 beeps, this means the transfer is done. Reboot the
PC and modify
the CMOS for your configuration.


                           -.bill.layer.-
                          
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