No more dead BIOS after updates!

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Most people don't know that on just about any board with an ISA slot (granted most newer boards do not have ISA slots) you can still boot even if your bios is trashed if you have an ISA video card, and then reflash it from there.

:)
 
Originally posted by Soul Harvester
Most people don't know that on just about any board with an ISA slot (granted most newer boards do not have ISA slots) you can still boot even if your bios is trashed if you have an ISA video card, and then reflash it from there.

:)

On quite a few boards, (even those without ISA slots) you can still boot from a DOS floppy anyway, providing it has an Autoexec file set up to Automatically flash the BIOS, but you do not get any display on the screen.
 
Let me clear this up.

There is a thing called the bootblock in a bios chip. If this is intact the bios can read the keyboard, floppy, and drive a default video display. With older motherboard the bootblock could only drive an ISA display adapter. Newer boards no longer have an ISA bus. These can drive a PCI adapter, and usually the AGP card.
If the bootblock is overwritten with garbage or the bootblock for the wrong motherboard, the unit won't post at all.

Most bios have what is called a bootblock recovery. This works even if you can't see the display. If the bootblock is gone it doesn't work.

For how to do a bootblock recovery, see our FAQs page at
http://www.badflash.com/faq.html
 
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