Programmers help with BIOS-Tool needed.

[Spirou]

Every once in a while people have problems caused by crashing flash tools.

AFAIK reflashing is impossible when there is no valid BIOS. But i think there must be a way to get around this and so i'd like to discuss the reasons why there is no solution to this problem.

When we get the facts together we should get this solved. Question is: where to start.

I sadly know near to nothing about hardware recognition, board initialization or flash programming. Last time i coded such is some 15 years ago on a Commodore Amiga :/

Any help appreciated.

[iStink]

Well I think since the bios basically helps the pc recognize the card altogether, once the bios goes bad, the computer doesn't know where to flash to anymore. When the card goes back to the factory, they have machines that know exactly everything they need to know about the card, so reflashing the bios can be forced in this way. On a PC, once the bios is gone, you might as well have nothing in that slot, because that's all the PC sees it as.

I wonder if there's a way to trick the computer though, like with a usb drive or something, so when it boots up, something tells it there's a video card in the slot. Then, blindly, a person can run a batch file or something and reflash it.

That would be really hard though, and I've never heard of anything like that. Maybe a brainy engineer can tell us if it's possible.

[W1zzard]

i assume you are talking about the pc rom bios ? not the vga bios. because i know for a fact that you can flash a new bios over a corrupted/empty ati vga bios

[Spirou]

In my case atiwinflash crashed while erasing my second card's BIOS before the new BIOS has been properly flashed. Now the system runs with card 0 at bus 1 and neither atiflash nor atwiwinflash start flashing card 1 at bus 2. Both deny with same error message stating there is no card 1 in system. The force option had no effect.

I spent the day reading all i could find on this topic, and so i found some more people with the same problem but noone who could solve this.

[phanbuey]

damn... is there a way for you to boot into dos and do a blindflash?

[Spirou]

I have two identical cards in two slots on my mainboard. So i can see what happens.

Atiflash seems to look for an enumeration that depends on boot time initialization. I think without BIOS data there's no enumeration at boot time and that's why Atiflash gives an error and doesn't even try. The card is warm and the fan runs but it doesn't get recognized. Why should it get damage by uncomplete flashing?

At least "atiflash -i" doesn't show the second card at all.

[phanbuey]

I hate to say this... but... RMA if you can.