NF7-S Corrupt Bios chip-need help

My MB with bios 18 just died, it wont boot at all, both lights are on, and the problem turns out to be the bios chip. I swapped it with the Epox 8RDA+ and it works, except I had to call M$ to activate XP.
I thought I was gonna do a hot swap in DOS but it didnt work, I get an error

the program file's part number does not match with your system

Click to expand...

If I hot swap the Epox chip (with power on) with the Abit chip, it will boot and I can even access the bios menu. This is only possible if I reboot with the reset key. If I power down and reboot, the system wont boot.
I was then able to update to bios 17 under windows using Abit Soft Menu program but the system wont boot afer this bios update, same problem.. Do you think this chip is really bad and sending it to be reprogrammed is a waste of time. What else can I do......????[

go to excaliberpc.com, they have a recovery kit for the abit nf7/nf7-s v.2.0. basically its an extra bios chip for the abit nf7/nf7-s series. It's like $20 shipped. Thats the only thing u can do if the hot swap didnt work.

If you can try the hot swap with the Epox board, you may be able to avoid the mismatch halt with Uniflash . You can try it with the Abit board first, but it says right in the FAQ's that it won't work with most abit motherboards. It wouldn't work with my KT7A. They cite an undocumented write protect. But it has worked for me with other motherboards.

I've seen other posts where there is supposed to be a / key that will force Award to proceed. But I'm not sure if there is such a key or not. This site lists many Awardflash keys, but none that I think will help. http://www.cybertechhelp.com/html/tutorials/tutorial.php/id/65

Repo Mann your info was very helpful. I managed to flash it with a boot disk.....by typing a: awdflash /tiny nameofnewbios.bin you can avoid that error message, but still it wont post.
I have called Abit and they say they dont reprogram a bios chip I will have to rma the whole board. Nice thinking. This is just insane. I bought another chip from excaliber but Abit will have to pay for this DEAD thing. Epox has sent me reprogrammed chips in the past.....I am not happy. I am sick of this NForce bios crap.

first all why, why did you use windows flash? its never recommended, i always flash bios using dos bootup. Just order nf7 survival kit and try hot flash your bios