Try not to do a bios upgrade when using Windows 7

[Studulike]

Hello all,

Just thought I would mention this as it is the second machine I have bolloxed now due to doing a bios upgrade.
A while ago I did a bios upgrade on a desktop machine and after doing it got a BSOD and windows would not boot. Had to format and do a fresh install to get over it.
This time round I did a bios upgrade on my laptop so that I could put a T9500 processor into it and got the same problem.

Bit of a pig this one though as I have 3 weeks of non backed up emails I will lose amongst other things.

It seems that if you do a bios upgrade windows 7 see's it as a different machine and just errors out without trying to load. There seems to be nothing you can do to recover from it.
Only option I have it to install another oppperating system on it and then see if I can downgrade bios. See if that will work.

Just be aware of this as not something that will show to often as not to common to have to upgrade bios. Hope this helps someone.

 

[Chris34]

Flashing a motherboard bios under windows with a non-beta/rc OS is already risky, so flashing a motherboard bios on a beta OS is....

If you have another computer, download hard drive manager from paragon and make a bootable CD or USB with it then boot your computer from it. There's an utility to restore the boot and if that doesn't work, in the partion manager there's another option to browse and copy files that are on the unbootable HDD.

You're lucky it didn't mess up your bios and it, apparently, only affected your MBR.

 

[dmex]

It seems that if you do a bios upgrade windows 7 see's it as a different machine and just errors out without trying to load. There seems to be nothing you can do to recover from it.
Only option I have it to install another oppperating system on it and then see if I can downgrade bios. See if that will work.

Just be aware of this as not something that will show to often as not to common to have to upgrade bios. Hope this helps someone.

Its strange that a failed bios flash would destroy the installed operating system or the MBR. If your bios was reset after the the flash failed then your hard-drive boot order was reset, You'll need to set the bios boot order to boot from the harddrive where windows is installed

 

[baarod]

Its strange that a failed bios flash would destroy the installed operating system or the MBR. If your bios was reset after the the flash failed then your hard-drive boot order was reset, You'll need to set the bios boot order to boot from the harddrive where windows is installed

BIOS flash didn't affect either. Windows detected a hardware change during the subsequent boot following the BIOS flash and tried to compensate for it. It failed. Probably rev'd the SATA firmware. 7 hates that.

 

[sevsman]

I've done bios updates on both my P5Q-PRO and a crappy Asrock without any problems at all. I always use either a floppy or usb though.

I'd never, and i meen never use a GUI flash utility for doing such a thing though...


*Edit*

Also, if you re-install 7 or go for vista you can just do an install and not format your HDD.
So there should be no reason to loose saved data...

 

[itznfb]

i flashed my dell xps m1330 from A13 to A15 the other day while running 7077x64 without issue. i did a bios flash on a custom build (gigabyte ga-965p-s3) running 7068x86 and i didn't get a blue screen but it reinstalled all my external devices and reinstalled the chipset drivers.

however, probably good advice by the OP to avoid a bios flash or at least remember to back up your data prior. i didn't really think about it before i flashed.

 

[Studulike]

Well I don't usually make silly mistakes like this but hey ho. lol
It has not damaged anything on the HDD or MBR, it is just win 7 see's things have changed in hardware and really does not like it.

Really am supprised it won't recover from it though.

I have a second boot of Windows 7 build 7048 64bit that won't boot either so probably what I will do is re-install 64Bit and maybe see if a downgrade Bios will work. Probably only need to go down a couple of versions and new processor support will be there.
Hell it is a pain that you buy a new laptop and from day one of buying it turns out that bios versions have moved on about 10 builds. lol
My laptop is only 3 weeks old as well. Just fancy putting the T9500 in it. I has a T5750 in it at the moment.

 

[Chris34]

Its strange that a failed bios flash would destroy the installed operating system or the MBR. If your bios was reset after the the flash failed then your hard-drive boot order was reset, You'll need to set the bios boot order to boot from the harddrive where windows is installed

read my sentence again and you'll see that I didn't mean the bios update by "it", but the BSOD when I said "You're lucky it didn't mess up your bios and it, apparently, only affected your MBR." If the BSOD caused a problem with the bios, he'd be crying that Windows 7 fried his motherboard rather than it killed his HDD.

A BSOD can mess your MBR and even if the bios had been reset from SATA-AHCI to IDE, Windows 7 should have picked the IDE mode and isntalled the IDE drivers as Vista does. Doing the opposite like going from IDE to SATA-AHCI without previously force-installing the SATA-AHCI drivers makes the machine unbootable. Yet, after saying that, and I know it works with vista as I did it quite a few times; I tried to go from RAID/SATA-AHCI to IDE and Windows 7 became unbootable.

My advice to recover his data if the bios hasn't been reset to another mode than what it was before updating the bios is valid. He doesn't need to reinstall something that can easily be fixed by either switching IDE/SATA modes in the bios or fix his MBR.

 

[ollie007]

windows flash programs are flacky at best, is it supported in windows7?? it needs to shut down a lot of windows protection....did it say successful flash and to restart?

 

[Psychlone]

I do a lot of testing on various machines (all AMD Phenom or Phenom II), and in that, I have to upgrade and downgrade the BIOS on several motherboards all the time.
The only time I've ever had a problem, was going from a beta BIOS 0701 to an official BIOS 0803 for the ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe - and it had nothing to do with Win7.

Granted, flashing any BIOS is risky business.
Having failsafes is mandatory, including a UPS and even going as far as having an extra BIOS chip or two laying around for each motherboard.

But, that being said, I've not had a single issue with any BIOS update or downgrade that could possibly even be related to Windows 7.
I've used the ASUS Update utility many, many times, along with Winflash - both in a Windows 7 x64 environment - without any errors.

Flashing the BIOS using a floppy (or bootable USB) is by far the safest though. AFUDOS for ASUS boards works well and is reliable...the only thing to even watch out for when using it is power surge/blackout/brownout.

Again, no problems here using BIOS flashing software from within Win7 in any build from 7000 to current.

Psychlone

 

[jimbo45]

Hello all,

.......
Bit of a pig this one though as I have 3 weeks of non backed up emails I will lose amongst other things.
..........

This isn't answering your post but could be a help "next time" or for other users using OUTLOOK (not OE BTW) as their email client.

You can download from MS a little program from the OFFICE site (it will check your office version is genuine first) called
pfbackup.exe

This will backup folders to a directory of your choice - even on a network. I use it for backing up to a USB stick. Backup is added to the FILE menu.

To restore stuff just open the backup folder and copy from the backup file to the main IN/OUT box(es) etc.

Quite a useful program as you can take this stuff as well to another computer to keep your emails "in sync".

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...3a-b7d0-4b16-b8af-5a6322f4fd01&displaylang=en

Cheers
jimbo

 

[johngalt]

I don't see where the OP said they flashed from *inside* windows. Until this is verified, we cannot *assume* that the BIOS was flashed from *within* windows.

That being said, the first BSOD and like was probably due to some feature that the BIOS enabled, or in fact could actually have been related to AHCI settings- windows will *not* allow you to change the AHCI settings at all without a total reinstall - that is the way Windows is. If your BIOS settings were reset after the flash then it is entirely possible that AHCI was changed from its previous setting to a different setting, thereby causing all your problems. Note - this would occur even in XP, Vista, and 200 as well - you simply cannot change the AHCI and expect Windows to work properly.

As for the second instance, it could be the same as I outlined above, or it could be the new processor, or a combination of other changes - Vista was pretty hardware dependent on my old test rig, and when I upgrade from a P4 .20 GHz machine to a P4 3.2 GHz machine, I could not get Vista to boot - at all. It is easy to assume that W7 is going to be the same as well.

 

[Studulike]

Well never ended up going down the route of processor upgrade for the time being. Will wait a few weeks I think.
Sorted out my problems. Turned out simple to sort as doing bios upgrade altered sata settings in bios and stopped boot into windows. I could get windows to boot back up by changing sata settings to a basic setup. The only thing that has ended up a problem was any IDE drive I had attached to the system would no longer open in windows untill I changed access rights.

Sorry took a while to get back on this one was kind of wrapped up with a few other things here.