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USB Boot For ATI Flashing?!?

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R

riven2000

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Oct 7, 2014
Hi All,

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro that I'm trying to flash to Mac from an HP Pavillion a710n (Athlon) in XP, and am having trouble sending the commands from the USB DOS drive. The drive is set up correctly, but when it starts, it shows the boot drive as C rather than whatever the correct letter is (I know when a floppy is used, it's supposed to be drive A). When I type in the atiflash -unlockrom 0, etc, it says Bad Command Or File Name. Others have been able to flash cards this way, but I can't get it to work. Is there a trick to this? Am I using the wrong kind of PC?

ANY help would be greatly appreciated :D
 
bamato said:
I'm confused, are you trying to re-flash the bios on the card? Which machine are you using the boot stick in?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I'm trying to flash a Windows 9800 to Mac, and trying to do it on a PC in DOS startup. All the tutorials I've read say to create a DOS boot disk (USB drive in this case), start the machine from it, and use ATIFlash to flash the card. The PC starts from the boot drive and shows drive letter A or whatever your DOS disk is, then you to type in the command for ATIFlash. On my machine, it always shows as drive C, and when I type the command in, it says Bad Command Or File Name. I've tried several different drive formatting utilities, and I have ATIFlash and the ROM on the disk, but DOS startup doesn't work like they say it should. That may not make much more sense, but the issue is with the PC not allowing me to use those ATIFlash commands.:screwy::confused:
 
here is a step by step with links and everything. you are doing something wrong.
if you need the dos files you might have to find an old windows 98 disk laying around or something i have the files on my server i can link if you need them. but you have to have the ati flash tool on the drive as well. and make sure you the ati flash tool is named what ever comand you are trying to type. EG i rename mine to flash.exe so it would be flash.exe -s 0 backup.bin ect.
http://www.overclock.net/t/640063/how-to-flash-ati-cards
 
wagex said:
here is a step by step with links and everything. you are doing something wrong.
if you need the dos files you might have to find an old windows 98 disk laying around or something i have the files on my server i can link if you need them. but you have to have the ati flash tool on the drive as well. and make sure you the ati flash tool is named what ever comand you are trying to type. EG i rename mine to flash.exe so it would be flash.exe -s 0 backup.bin ect.
http://www.overclock.net/t/640063/how-to-flash-ati-cards
Click to expand...

Thanks much - but I already followed her directions. The problem comes when I boot into DOS. Instead of giving me the USB drive's letter, it always gives me C:\. I type in atiflash.exe -f -p 0 (new bios name).bin, and get the Bad Command Or File Name error. Can't even get to the flashing part. I wonder if it has something to do with the machine itself.
 
you need to navigate to the drive and folder that atiflash is in. For me, i do it though a cmd window from within windows but it should be the same. I have my atiwinflash in a folder in c:\ called winflash so when i open command prompt it says c:\windows\system32 and i need to type "cd c:\winflash" without the quotations and that leaves me in the atiflash folder which reads c:\winflash then i type atiwinflash.exe -f -p 0 romname.rom to execute the flash.

If you are getting the bad command or file name error it sounds like you arent in the right directory for your flash program. So you will need to find out what drive letter your usb key is when you boot to dos, then its just a simple matter of going to the right folder.

edit: when you find out your usb keys drive letter you would switch to it by typing "cd x:\flashfoldername" without the quotes at the c:\
So for example if your usb key is drive D and your atiflash files are in a folder called atiflash when you are at the dos prompt it would look like this c:\cd d:\atiflash
 
+1^^^^^^^^
you can not run atiflash.exe unless in the folder.

thats why they tell you to type DIR.

it works better with a fresh stick with everything right on the root of the stick.

I have a usb stick with only Rom's and the flash tool on it no other folders and have never had a issue flashing fw's on amd gpu's like that.

also make sure the rom name is small something like 9800mac.rom would work Then just type atiflash.exe -f -p 0 9800mac.rom

also they are not bin files they are supposed to be rom files if i remember. .
 
I'm sorry, type DIR? Never heard that before. The steps I've been doing are basically putting ATIFlash and the ROM on the USB stick, restarting in DOS (screen shows "welcome to DOS" or something, and C:\ for the command prompt) - then I type the atiflash command, and always get the Bad Command or File Name. It seems like there are different ways of doing this. Can you tell me what you're actual steps are, so I don't miss typing something critical?:D



SF101 said:
+1^^^^^^^^
you can not run atiflash.exe unless in the folder.

thats why they tell you to type DIR.

it works better with a fresh stick with everything right on the root of the stick.

I have a usb stick with only Rom's and the flash tool on it no other folders and have never had a issue flashing fw's on amd gpu's like that.

also make sure the rom name is small something like 9800mac.rom would work Then just type atiflash.exe -f -p 0 9800mac.rom

also they are not bin files they are supposed to be rom files if i remember. .
Click to expand...
 
When I start up from the DOS disk, it says:

C:\>dir

Volume in drive C is 1 GB
Volume Serial Number is A4CC-1F56
Directory of C:\

ATIFLA~2 EXE 665,600 10-09-13 11:38a
H9800PRO ROM 53,248 10-04-14 10:01p
2 file(s) 718,848 bytes
0 dir(s) 1,045,626,880 bytes free

I guess that indicates the C drive is the DOS disk, but am I typing something wrong otherwise?: :eek:



RGone said:
C:\ << When you are there type dir and press the Enter Key. What do you see on screen then??
RGone...
Click to expand...
 
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