Asus A7N266-VM :: BIOS ERASED

[Syrum]

I was having an issue with my computer where after booting up XP SP2 and getting just far enough to load the taskbar and desktop icons, it would reboot itself. This pattern repeated itself over and over until finally XP stayed up for a little longer and a message came up saying Windows had recovered from a serious error. When I reported the problem to microsoft they sent me back a webpage with the Asus website and said that Asus had reported a solution to the issue. Apparently I needed a BIOS upgrade.

I have the Asus A7N266-VM motherboard running an AMD Athalon processor. My bios was revision 1003 and they are currently on 1007. I downloaded the new .BIN file and the WINDOWS flash utility. (All while being rebooted automatically by my machine every few minutes). In the spans of time when my machine was not rebooting itself, windows was popping up saying it had recovered from a serious error. After several serious error messages, it would reboot.

When I ran the BIOS flash utility for windows, it erased the old BIOS, Flashed the new BIOS, but could not verify that the new BIOS was in place. I tried it twice before my computer rebooted itself again. This time however, it never came back.

So I've concluded that there is no BIOS instructions left. There is no way to boot from a floppy and flash again, since it never gets around to checking the floppy drive. It doesn't even do the POST beep.

I've found the motherboard manual online and it says nothing about jumpers to read the BIOS from floppy instead of chip, but I've been asking around and there is a rumour this is possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
b.

[Syrum]

I'm not sure if it matters but I found that the processor is an AMD Athlon 1333.

Thanks,
b.

[fryincpus]

As a former owner of 2 of those boards, I have never heard of or seen of that. Your computer rebooting leads to more serious issues. I don't know for sure if it's just your board. Rebooting usually leads to faulty power supply, overheating cpu, faulty memory or a bad hard drive and possibly a flaky board.

[bubbalou32]

As with any bios flash, if your hardware is not in order, the flash can fail. Power supply issues, bad RAM or an overheating processer could all contribute to the reboots and subsequent flash failure. Is your system overclocked?

I have a AN7N266-E and the bios can be rewritten in DOS or with ASUS's Windows flash utility. I don't believe there is a way to do it from floppy without being able to boot. Unless you have a similar board and can "hotflash" the chip, your only alternative is to purchase a new bios chip from ASUS or one the third party bios vendors. Even with the proper bios, it still sounds like you have other hardware problems to deal with.

[Obsolete]

http://a7vtroubleshooting.com/
that place has everything imaginable on all Asus a7v motherboards, they should have a solution for you, they did for when i miss flashed my A7v classic