- Joined
- Apr 29, 2002
My Iwill DH800 Xeon duallie is now on the latest BIOS v1.40 @ 220MHz fsb. Just flashed to it last night after a week long nightmare of trying to install XP back on my Raptor.
A week ago my much tweaked and beloved XP install just refused to boot again and eventually nuked itself when I tried the repair console command "FIXBOOT". That effectively wiped out the FS table of whatever the NTFS equivalent is. RT-Studio rescued my data off the partition no problem.
I tried all the usual tricks to reinstall XP but anytime any bootable hard drive was first in the boot order selection, no XP install CD would boot nor would a first stage XP hard drive install.
I managed to get the XP install disk to boot if I selected my only non bootable array. It seemed to install normally until the first reboot. For some reason the machine wouldn't recognize the hal.dll file and XP would fail to boot. I got Vista to install but it seemed buggier than usual and after a few days I nuked it.
I couldn't even get DR-DOS to boot in order to run the WD diag floppy unless I was on that nonbootable array. Weird stuff
I had a BIOS reflash in the back of my mind all along but I didn't think a BIOS write protect option would allow BIOS corruption. Wrong!
Once I eliminated all the obvious suspects the least likely one turned out to be the culprit. Now I can even OC in v1.40 which I couldn't do before. Must have been some left over dregs in the prior BIOS when I tried this last year.
This time I turned everything off, fully discharging the PS by holding down the start switch several seconds and pulling the CMOS battery for a minute or two. Then I restarted the machine with the DR-DOS no driver boot/flashing floppy in and re-flashed my BIOS.
Success! Now everything is great and I might try an even higher OC later on during spring break. I don't want to take a chance of borking my system during winter term as I need it for an online writing class. WR123.
The moral of this story is that if you get weirdness in your system that can't be explained by normal software/hardware checks, it might be your BIOS is borked just enough to be an irritating annoyance even though everything seems to be working.
A week ago my much tweaked and beloved XP install just refused to boot again and eventually nuked itself when I tried the repair console command "FIXBOOT". That effectively wiped out the FS table of whatever the NTFS equivalent is. RT-Studio rescued my data off the partition no problem.
I tried all the usual tricks to reinstall XP but anytime any bootable hard drive was first in the boot order selection, no XP install CD would boot nor would a first stage XP hard drive install.
I managed to get the XP install disk to boot if I selected my only non bootable array. It seemed to install normally until the first reboot. For some reason the machine wouldn't recognize the hal.dll file and XP would fail to boot. I got Vista to install but it seemed buggier than usual and after a few days I nuked it.
I couldn't even get DR-DOS to boot in order to run the WD diag floppy unless I was on that nonbootable array. Weird stuff
I had a BIOS reflash in the back of my mind all along but I didn't think a BIOS write protect option would allow BIOS corruption. Wrong!
Once I eliminated all the obvious suspects the least likely one turned out to be the culprit. Now I can even OC in v1.40 which I couldn't do before. Must have been some left over dregs in the prior BIOS when I tried this last year.
This time I turned everything off, fully discharging the PS by holding down the start switch several seconds and pulling the CMOS battery for a minute or two. Then I restarted the machine with the DR-DOS no driver boot/flashing floppy in and re-flashed my BIOS.
Success! Now everything is great and I might try an even higher OC later on during spring break. I don't want to take a chance of borking my system during winter term as I need it for an online writing class. WR123.
The moral of this story is that if you get weirdness in your system that can't be explained by normal software/hardware checks, it might be your BIOS is borked just enough to be an irritating annoyance even though everything seems to be working.
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