About to attempt a hot flash

Well, since my rig is down with a bad bios, I am thinking about a hot flash. I have a Soyo MB K7V Dragon PLus. The socket for bios is the same size and it uses awdflash. I am concern about how to lift the bios chip. Any suggestions on what you use to lift the Bios chip. Special Tooling?

I would really recommend that you go to a Radio Shack, and buy a chip puller. It is very easy to damage the the BIOS I.C. without the correct tool.

If you have any other questions about the hot swap, use the search. I have to go to work.

I hot flash my BIOS chip fairly regularly - about once a week (ASUS hasn't commented on the HUGE BIOS corruption problems that this board has - and I have voided my warranty, so I cannot try and return my board and buy myself an ABIT NF7).

I use a bulletin-board thumbtack to remove my BIOS chips (I have two for swapping/hotflashing). The pins *DO* get a little bent, but they are easy to fix. I wouldn't reccomend the risk of using a thumbtack though - I would buy the right tool from Radioshack.

I'm prolly going to buy myself a BIOS savior device...

any danger in hot flashing?

As I understand it, hot-flashing means that one pulls out the bios chip from the mobo of a computer having similar chipset/bios as the dead one, AFTER it has booted and running, and fixes the dead bios chip in the socket while system is still running to flash it .
If I am wrong please correct me and if I am right , please answer my question.
Is it safe to pull out and fix in bios chips while the system is still running?Doesn,t it affect the running system?Is there a possibility of shorting something or some such issues?

You are correct about what a hotswap is, and yes, there is some danger. It can be done safely, both Felinusz and I can tell you that from experience.

If the chips is pulled carefully, and reinserted correctly, there is very little risk. But poking around inside a powered up computer always entails some risk. And inserting the BIOS chip incorrectly can result in an instantly fried BIOS chip, and possibly worse.

Use at your own risk, and only when necessary.

Thanx for clearing doubt.

I have a dead bios in a rev 1.04 A7N8X - can I hot flash this in a rev 2.0 PCB assuming I use the correct bios version - for the 1.04? Or will I run into problems with bad checksums and stuff? Shame to see a good board going to waste with a spare XP2700 as well.
I have also eliminated everything else as the root cause of the problem, i.e. trying different CPU's, GFX cards, PSU's, etc. It happened when I re-booted after making a change in the bios.

I have not done this with a different version MB, but theoretically it should work. if both boards use the award flash program, it will work. The only environment you are dealing with in a hot flash is a bios chip, DOS, floppy disk and award flash. The one thing you will have to be careful of in the rev 2.0 is after the flash is complete, shut down the computer completely before it reboots, so that way the computer does not update the bios profile onto itself. Just remove it and place the good bios chip back on the rev 2.0 and you are good to go. I did a hot flash with same mother board. The one thing I must caution to you is the size of Bios chip. I am not sure if there is an issue between bios size, for example a 2 MB vs 4 MB Bios chip. The rev 2.0 uses a 4 MB chip. If this is an issue, I think there is a flash program called uniflash that will allow you to flash with different bios/chipset platforms. I wouldn't worry about this. I think you will be alright with what you have. If it does not work, no problem, you will back to square one with dead bios chip. Your rev 2.0 should be fine.

Yep - it should work fine. Any motherboard that uses the same sized BIOS socket as the BIOS chip you need to hotflah should work.

You will get an error message "THIS BIOS IS THE WRONG ONE FOR THIS BOARD - FLASHING IT WILL DESTROY YOUR BOARD ETC. ETC.", but just select "continue" and flash anyways.

As Sniper.nkc said - When you are done make sure you power off before the board tries to save to CMOS and post - failure to do so will require you to hotflash all over again.