This is something I thought about after reading a member’s post who had killed his bios. While in the process of flashing his bios he had a power cut! Now the other night I had 2 power cuts in a 1.5hour period, luckily I wasn't trying to flash my bios, but made me realise this could have happened to me!
Now I found some info, apparently most modern bios chips have a 'boot-block BIOS', an area of the bios which isn't overwritten and just holds enough code to read the floppy and therefore allow you to recover from a disaster situation. Here is an extra telling you how to do it from: http://www.ping.be/bios/index.html then click on FAQ.
Solution 1: Boot-block BIOS
Modern motherboards have a boot-block BIOS. This is small area of the BIOS that doesn't get overwritten when you flash a BIOS.
The boot-block BIOS only has support for the floppy drive. If you have a PCI video card you won't see anything on the screen
because the boot-block BIOS only supports an ISA video card.
Award: The boot-block BIOS will execute an AUTOEXEC.BAT file on a bootable diskette. Copy an Award flasher & the correct
BIOS *.bin file on the floppy and execute it automatically by putting awdflash *.bin in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
AMI: The AMI boot-block BIOS will look for a AMIBOOT.ROM file on a diskette. Copy and rename the correct BIOS file on the
floppy and power up the PC. The floppy doesn't need to be bootable. You will see the PC read the floppy, after about 4 minutes
you will hear 4 beeps, this means the transfer is done. Reboot the PC and modify the CMOS for your configuration.
Does anyone know if this is present on Asus boards (I have the A7V133), has anyone ever tried this?
I've never seen this mentioned in the manual or Asus site. It makes perfect sense to include a boot-block on bios chips, why wouldn't this be included it can only support the end user. Unless of course they didn't want to be able to recover and force you to try and source a new bios chip or worst still have to buy a new board, I wonder...
Now I found some info, apparently most modern bios chips have a 'boot-block BIOS', an area of the bios which isn't overwritten and just holds enough code to read the floppy and therefore allow you to recover from a disaster situation. Here is an extra telling you how to do it from: http://www.ping.be/bios/index.html then click on FAQ.
Solution 1: Boot-block BIOS
Modern motherboards have a boot-block BIOS. This is small area of the BIOS that doesn't get overwritten when you flash a BIOS.
The boot-block BIOS only has support for the floppy drive. If you have a PCI video card you won't see anything on the screen
because the boot-block BIOS only supports an ISA video card.
Award: The boot-block BIOS will execute an AUTOEXEC.BAT file on a bootable diskette. Copy an Award flasher & the correct
BIOS *.bin file on the floppy and execute it automatically by putting awdflash *.bin in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
AMI: The AMI boot-block BIOS will look for a AMIBOOT.ROM file on a diskette. Copy and rename the correct BIOS file on the
floppy and power up the PC. The floppy doesn't need to be bootable. You will see the PC read the floppy, after about 4 minutes
you will hear 4 beeps, this means the transfer is done. Reboot the PC and modify the CMOS for your configuration.
Does anyone know if this is present on Asus boards (I have the A7V133), has anyone ever tried this?
I've never seen this mentioned in the manual or Asus site. It makes perfect sense to include a boot-block on bios chips, why wouldn't this be included it can only support the end user. Unless of course they didn't want to be able to recover and force you to try and source a new bios chip or worst still have to buy a new board, I wonder...
