bios troubles

[dogcatcher69]

I am running xp pro and when I boot up my computer, and press del to enter the bios screen it loads xp without even recognizing I hit the del key. I downloaded the updated bios for my mainboard and it is a .rom extention, I don't know how to run this to update the bios on my chip. I also got the flash rom from the mainboard web site and that is an .exe and ran that but it just pops up the dos inside of windows and shuts down right away. Xp doesn't run through dos, so I can't exit to dos to try and run the flash rom programs there. I have a M810 mainboard made by pcchips. Any help will be appreciated.

[Ammok]

Pcchips are not the best quality of bords out there. But you can still run a command prompt from the

Start-programs-accessories-command prompt in xp.

But you can alwways boot from a win98 boot disk and run it from there also.

[Bovon]

On boot up, you can start hitting (bumping) the delete key right after it starts booting. Sometimes with these faster systems, it has already past the point of entering setup by the time the monitor gets a signal to its screen.

To flash your bios, you really need to get into your bios and disable any bios or video shadowing, then load the bios defaults from the menu screen.

Do not attempt to flash your bios from a DOS prompt from Windows...do it from pure dos. Go to www.bootdisk.com and download the DrDos7 boot disk, Place your flash utility and rom file on this diskette once you have extracted the files to the diskette from the download. This will get you to the point to where you have narrowed down the possible pit-falls enough so that you have a good chance of a succeffull flash.

Go to the following thread here at SysOpt and read...it has some advice about flashing.

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=98927

[dogcatcher69]

Thank you for the help, i had to hit the del before anything came up to get into the bios, holding it down right away worked.....what does updating the bios do for my system? Are there any great advantages to doing this?

[Bovon]

There are only a very few reasons to upgrade your bios.

1) Overclockers do it to get special functions to assist in overclocking that are not available in the factory bios.

2) When a board gets a little age on it, newer bios upgrades will allow larger hard drives, more ram (sometimes) newer processors ect.

3) Every so often, a new board will have problems show up after the board has been on the shelves for awhile. This is sometimes corrected with a bios upgrade.

If your system is reasonably new, and its working good...there is no need to flash the bios. There have been people that flashed their bios only to find that the old bios worked better for them, and had to go back to the old bios file.

[bassman]

Just a small detail; you can increase the odds of a successful flash if you run the Flash utility from a drive other than A: (you can run it from the RAMDrive, if you boot with a win98 disk), like C: or other (if available). It's not advisable to run a flash from the floppy.

[Psycho Logical]

Originally posted by bassman
Just a small detail; you can increase the odds of a successful flash if you run the Flash utility from a drive other than A: (you can run it from the RAMDrive, if you boot with a win98 disk), like C: or other (if available). It's not advisable to run a flash from the floppy.

What is the basis for this claim? I have never seen a manufacturer's website advise running a BIOS update program from anything but a floppy.

If a RAM disk is being created, the system is not booting into raw or pure DOS.

[bassman]

I believe I haven't expressed myself correctly, or I was misunderstood; for that, I apologize.

To support my advise: http://www.msi.com.tw/support/bios/note.htm