Difficulty upgrading bios on a Nforce2 chipset

[sethbest]

Can't track any info on flashing a bios for a pheonix-award mobo. Plenty on just awards, but they dont match my bios numbers.

BIOS type: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
BIOS ID: 08/04/2004-nVidia-nForce-JL61BC6CC-00

Note that I tracked down an updated bios from the Chaintech website, its a chaintech mobo, but its just a rar of different bios versions with different numbering systems, not realy saying which is the newest and the ones with the latest revision numbers are only as new as november of 2004.

Hoping that upgrading the bios will upgrade the raid controller so it can see my new drives. Every forum post i've found with people asking the same question people reply with "well dont flash the bios do this:" so i havnt seen any actual help on upgrading a bios.

Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated, short of "buy a subscription to a program that updates your drivers".

 

[captaincranky]

If the "latest" BIOS revision is 2004, then you may not be able to upgrade .

Most (if not all) BIOS are tied to a board/chipset/manufacturer combination, and I doubt if it's prudent to go "BIOS shopping" and install an alien piece of firmware in your beloved board. It sounds like a recipe for disaster,

The RAID controllers you speak off should be based in hardware as well, and your board simply may not have the capabilities you want.

It's way easy to turn a board into a brick with an improper BIOS flash, even the right update.

I realize that I'm no fun, sorry. Maybe someone else knows more about this than I do.

A quick google leads me to believe that the Phoenix Corporation manufacturers "Award BIOS", and that they're really not 2 separate entities. But here again, things change fast in tech products.
Here's the answer, they've merged: http://vista-agent.com/

 

[sethbest]

You're right about the merger, but i read that they outsourced all of their bios support to http://www.esupport.com/ but that site is only an ad for driveragent.

Oh well you may be right, thanks for the info. I was looking forward to flashing it since in all my years i've never had to try it, but best to not risk it.

My problem is my raid setup utility will only see 1 samsung spinpoint drive at a time, so won't let me make an array, but with raid disabled windows see's both drives when loaded.

Guess i'll just keep tinkering around with it, maybe give up on the array idea.

 

[captaincranky]

Have you tried reinstalling Windows? The SATA drivers have to be installed at the prompt; "If you need to install third party RAID drivers press F6". (Or at least very close to that.
The reason (I think) that you see both drives without the RAID enabled, is that the board might be auto-configuring itself to run the drives as IDE. (Hence there is no need for the SATA drivers).