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Corrupted VGA BIOS

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Biofear

Member
Joined
May 10, 2004
Well I tried to flash the VGA BIOS for my Sapphire 5970 to get a new version that enables manual fan control. I used the instructions from Tomshareware.com

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/276280-33-tutorial-manual-control-sapphire-5970


Well I think I really did it this time. I forgot to change the setting for formatting the USB stick from FAT to FAT32. After flashing the VGA BIOS I restarted and now my motherboard BIOS tell me I need to update the VGA BIOS. The PC won't post at all and I'm ready to kick myself in the butt for doing it. If anyone has any ideas please HELP! Now all I have is a huge paper weight. :temper:
 
You will need a PCI VGA card in order to flash the 5970 again. Ther could be an option to make a bootable floppy/usb disk to do a blind flash but I don't know how to do this with ATi cards and if your computer won't post it wouldn't be a option anyway.
 
Well I've got a crossfire motherboard installed and a 8800gts videocard laying around that I could use. Would that do?
 
Yes that should do. You will install your 8800gts (maybe in the top PCI-E, not sure if it matters) put your ati card in the 2nd PCI-E. And connect your screen to the 8800, fingers crossed your PC should boot and allow you to re-flash your Ati card. Let us know how you get on.
 
Make sure when you use atiflash, to type "atiflash -f -p 1 xxx.rom/bin" if you have your HD 5970 in the 2nd PCI-Express slot. Otherwise you could end up forcing it to flash the ATI BIOS to your nVidia card...

So with just the HD 5970 installed in your board, when you boot you still get video saying you need to update the VGA BIOS?
 
So with just the HD 5970 installed in your board, when you boot you still get video saying you need to update the VGA BIOS?

Well the Crosshair motherboards have a digital display the shows you each step during POST. It stops on "VGA BIOS".

My latest update: I'm able to get back into windows with the Nvidia card in the top PCI-E slot and 5970 in the bottom one. But under device manager I'm getting errors under the ATI card "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" So I reflashed the card and removed the drivers and used Driver cleaner. Then tried to reinstall the drivers. Still no love. I'm thinking there is something up with the BIOS because when I put the card in by its self it still fails in POST. Also there are 2 Bin files that get flashes to the card one for Master one for Slave. So this seems to get trickier as time goes on. If you guys check out the link I mentioned in the first post, there is a power point file that goes step by step.
 
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