ATI 5870m Bad Bios Flash

[huntdawn]

Hi guys.

I messed up while flashing a BIOS from ASUS for 5870m to mine which was made for Dell Alienware.

The card is now completely dead. If i plug it in, the boot process will not even load the motherboard's BIOS which means that I can't boot from another device and re-flash.

I have seen online some posts about locating the BIOS chip on the vga card and bridge pin 1 with pin 8, plug in the card and then unbridge those and re-flash.

I have also seen a post about 'hot plug in' but I prefer not to attempt this on a laptop, unless I want to risk to burn the entire thing.

Does anyone have any experience with this, or maybe knows where to locate that chip on a 5870m?

I just hope this is not a dead-end.

Thank you.

 

[Aquinus]

Hate to say it, but your laptop is probably fried. You're going to have a heck of a time trying to find the right chip to jump assuming that it isn't stored with the system BIOS in the first place. There isn't a whole lot you can do at this point.

If you read the threads about all the other people who've tried flashing their laptop, you would see that it almost never ends well. Sorry man, it's a tough lesson learned.

 

[huntdawn]

The laptop is working fine with the 5870m i already had.

I need to reflash the second card with a good BIOS.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Is the second card a MXM card? is it a separate card or part of the laptop?

If it is a separate card you might be able to locate the bios chip. You could try posting some high resolution pics of it here, and someone might be able to identify the bios chip.

 

[Aquinus]

Ah, I missed that. I thought it was a 5870m that was built-in. I missed that you got a new one. I'm not sure how easy it will be to flash it considering the machine won't even post with it installed. What was wrong with the old 5870m that made you buy a new one if you don't mind me asking?

 

[huntdawn]

There is nothing wrong with my primary 5870M. I own a m17x R2 Alienware and I wanted to put a 2nd one in xfire.

I had updated the primary one with the latest VBIOS recommended from Dell. I could see that the card was Rev A01.

The 2nd card I bought is Rev A02. I tried to flash the same VBIOS from Dell but it wouldn't accept it. I was getting an error like fln01 or something similar. That's when the problem started.

I attempted to flash a VBIOS from Asus (which I got from the DB from this website) to check if that would be ok by using the AtiFlash tool.
I forced the flashing with -fp -fs (if I recall correctly) and that made the card useless from that point on.

I should have tried to force the flashing using the VBIOS from Dell...don't know why I didn't try that first. I guess a random mistake while trying to make this work.

 

[huntdawn]

Foto of the VGA Card

This is the card. If anyone can tell me which one is the VBIOS chip and if it's possible to do the 1st to 8th bridged pins trick to be able to reflash it, would be really nice.

Many thanks guys!


http://s22.postimg.org/awk21174x/ATI_5870_M.jpg

 

[huntdawn]

Found a foto about this.

Can anyone verify?

http://static05.techinferno.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/eeprom-location.jpg

 

[Deleted member 24505]

That is indeed the bios, the pins on the right hand side look a bit scruffy to me.

You probably could, but you need to remove the 1-8 link when the machine boots up, how easy will it be to do that in a laptop?

I'm not certain, only W1zzard could verify it, but you might be able to bridge pins 1 and 8 on the jtag connector next to the bios instead of trying to connect to the bios chip.

 

[huntdawn]

Alright. Thank you all for your answers till this point.

I will probably attempt to link 1->8 pins and remove the link once the machine boots up to the BIOS.

I can't see any other solution at the moment, and I will have to try at least that, since I spent a good amount of money on this.