Dead 6950 after attemping to unlock it.

[bharmon1981]

Hi everyone.
I have a major issue. Today like a complete idiot, I decided that I would try to unlock my MSI 6950 frozr 2 gig card and make it a 6970. Using a batchfile I found at http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159, It completed it successfully and when I went to reboot it was dead. I am unable to do anything atm and I cannot afford another graphics card right now, but a friend is allowing me to use a 7900 GT nvidia card. The card I have does not have the 2 bios switch, which like an idiot I did not check for first. My question is this. Is it possible for me to fix this and if so exactly what do I need to do. Any help would be greatly, GREATLY appreciated. With the holidays coming up, life is going to suck without the ability to game at all. Thanks again.

 

[erocker]

Does your motherboard have two "full length" PCI-E Slots?

 

[bharmon1981]

Yes, it has 2 full PCI express slots. I also, I am not 100% sure, I think I have the backup copy of the original bios I used, i looked through some files of mine, and found that one of the BIN files included a serial type number that was 6 digits and located on the bios chip, I left my card at a friends on accident, but I am thinking that number is the same, which would mean it was the cards first bios.

 

[Neuromancer]

You can fix it without a second card but since you have one, just look up how to flash a second card in your system

IE when I had to reflash a 580 that was dead I had to do --list command first to figure out it was unit 1 as the second unit (duh) so I added --index=1 before everything else to the Command line before flashing (but htat was nvflash, your switches will be different using atiflash)

Same will go for whatever app you are using although you will have to find them through google.

Google "app you are using" + switches if using CLI

If using GUI just look for the walk through for it, and check out flashing second card.

It will always have "this command shows list" "this command adds the nubmer from that list to the flashing process.

Should get a PCI error if you tried flashing a 6950 bios to a 7xxx series nV GPU anyway.

EDIT: Just incase you do not understand, in DOS anything following a hypen or a slash is called a "switch" it tells the EXE you are running to do something different. For nvflash a double hyphen indicates language based switches. so --index might also be -1 or something (not sure just an example). With nvlfash for instance you will see a lot of people recomend running nvflash -4 -5 -6 I chose not to use those directions since I did not know what those switches meant (i did the first time and borked my card) the second time I did it right and googled it and nvflash /? in DOS to get the right commands.

/? is the help switch.. lists all possible switches for the program.

 

[cadaveca]

Is it possible for me to fix this and if so exactly what do I need to do.

Yes, it is possible to fix.

The issue that "killed" your card is the BIOS you flashed. Your MSI twin Frozer card is not of the same design as the BIOS in the script you used, and therefore, as you have discovered, the BIOSes are incompatible.

If the card is recognized by the system, you shouldn't have much problem flashing the card back.

You'll probably want to create a DOS boot disck, use ATIFlash, with the command:

AtiFlash -f -p 1 bios.bin.

If you have teh nVidia card in the uppermost slot.