Bios flash gone bad: (

[peck1234]

Was upgrading my bios on my dell mini 9 from f5 to f6. Windows froze up during the install so I pulled the plug. (bad idea) Now I cant even post!

Please Help...

Would removing the mobo battery clear the bios?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'd guess the CMOS battery pull won't help you.

But I'd do it as a last resort, because the normal solution to BIOS flash failures is to take your motherboard to the trash or contact the manufacturer (or possibly a third party supplier) and have a chip replaced on the motherboard.

The general advice is to not flash the BIOS from Windows whenever possible. Too late for that now.

 

[Night Hawk]

Before attempting to reflash any board the concept of first backing up the present bios is something most never take into consideration. When you had to manually flash a bios while booting from a floppy that was one thing always done first in case of a bad flash.

Winflashes generally go right without problems if you simply let the flash tool sit long enough to finish. Without even the initial post you can't even set a floppy drive if you had one as the first boot device in order to use a manual flash tool to fix things. You can pull the battery to see but don't expect much.

Someone else I know just ran into this only with the flash option at post time that went toast! Nothing later! New build time!

 

[peck1234]

Dam... winflash was going but it froze up... should have just left it!!!

anyway what is this>?? and what is DD?

Dell Mini 9 USB pendrive recovery from failed BIOS flash | fosk.it! 2.0

 

[Frostmourne]

At least my Gigabyte board has 2 physical BIOS chips and a backup on the hard drive. Can you try and reflash?

 

[peck1234]

At least my Gigabyte board has 2 physical BIOS chips and a backup on the hard drive. Can you try and reflash?

Its not on my gaming rig, its on my dell mini 9 (netbook)

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Here is wikipedia on DD:

dd (Unix) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Frostmourne]

Yes, try reflashing.

 

[peck1234]

Well, since I have no idea how to use DD and cant find any user friendly GUI's to help me put the AO5.dd image on my flash drive I'm sunk...

Unless of course 1 of you guys know hows to work with dd and can prepare the files for me... : /

 

[Night Hawk]

If the netbook won't even post long enough to select a usb floppy boot or off of a flash drive you're sunk anyways! The flash drive image in the blog there shows how to recover the bios manually by booting off of a separate drive or device in order to recover from a bad flash.

Another recovery method surfaced you may find useful for the Dell mini 9 series. Dell I910 Mini/Vostro A90 USB Key Drive flashBIOS Utility

 

[peck1234]

Thanks... ill give it a shot...

 

[Night Hawk]

Let us know how you make out with this. Otherwise you'll end up needing to bring in or sent it back for service with a charge attached!

 

[peck1234]

Looks like this one going to need service....

dam bios... should have just left it!

admin can marked this one solved...

 

[Night Hawk]

Unfortunately you ran into the "don't fix unless broken" scenario and ended up with a mishap!

This is one reason why I rarely go for bios updates unless a fix is seen with a new board in an update. Too often people tell others "You have to" when you don't have to go for the latest while things are already in good working shape.

Hopefully now it won't cost you "an arm and a leg" to see fixed but be covered under warranty at least despite the inconvenience and likely shipping costs.

 

[peck1234]

Unfortunately you ran into the "don't fix unless broken" scenario and ended up with a mishap!

This is one reason why I rarely go for bios updates unless a fix is seen with a new board in an update. Too often people tell others "You have to" when you don't have to go for the latest while things are already in good working shape.

Hopefully now it won't cost you "an arm and a leg" to see fixed but be covered under warranty at least despite the inconvenience and likely shipping costs.

I'll report back when once it's fixed. (if it can be)

I wish every mobo had dual bios, then this issue could have been fixed easily....

 

[Night Hawk]

Powering everything down right in the middle of a flash wouldn't be good news even if your board had a second eprom chip on it. You will likely end up needing to ship it into the manufacturer to have them replace that with the bios version you request on it.

Asus was charging $25 for seeing that done when one inquiry was made back in 2008. But that was for one of their older models at the time.