Wrong Bios Disaster Recovery! (W1zzards trick)

[Laurijan]

Hello all!

When nothing may seem to help try this!

I am writing this tread in quite a joy because I was able to restore a bad bios flash on my X600 with some help from the thread: "I flashed my X1900 Crossfire with an X1300 bios" from W1zzard.

I have an PCI-E Club3d X600 XT 128Mb Hynix 2.8ns card and flashed the Asus X600 XT 128Mb 2.2nsHynix bios on it (from the "ATI Bios Collection") .
No error messages while flashing and so I rebooted. No picture.. Hmm ...
I installed an old PCI graphics card removed the faulty PCI-E card and reset the motherboard bios. I installed the faulty one again (OF CORSE WITH POWER OFF! HOTSWAPING GRAPHIC CARDS IS DANGEROUS) and booted the PC from the PCI card.
I booted Flashrom from a bootdisk and was shocked that "flashrom -i" didn´t show the PCI-E card. Actual flashing with "flashrom -p 0 bios.bin" didn´t work either.
When booting up with only the PCI-E installed the PC didn´t post (no beep sound) so blind-flashing from a bootdisk was not possible.

I asked for help in the forum and Dolf gave me the link to the "W1zzards trick".
I have an 25P05V6 flashrom on my PCI-E card. So it were the same pins to connect which was uses in the article (1 and 8). I bought some thin wire and a switch. I set the switch in the middle of the wire and soldered the ends of the wire to the pins. I checked that the switch position did short-circuit pins 1 and 8 - and installed the card.
Booted up from the PCI card, booted to Flashrom ... AND ... it worked "flashrom -i" did find the card. Man I was happy
I had the switch on the wire hanging outside my case and switched it to the other position
(WITH POWER ON). Then the programming ability of the video bios returned and i flashed the old bios on the card. I shut down the computer and removed the wire from the pins. Rebooted .. It´s magic...
So to remember:
Short-circuit pins = Previosly not recognized card is recognized
No short-circuit = Can be flashed again

I do not understand what went wrong in the first place (Tread:"Flashed Wrong Video Bios :-(" ) but it worked for me and now I am not afraid of video bios flashing anymore because I am quite sure the trick will work in most cases and when not then blind-flashing or then the PCI card trick.

With the switch this can be made a permanent mod on the panel of the card. Cuting the wire in 2 is also a way - but I do not recommend to just pull of the wire of one pin because the wire-end could short circuit something.