Friday, August 29, 2008

Flashing my new BIOS's

My stationary computer started acting up and would not let me reinstall an operating system on it a couple of weeks back. After replacing most of the peripheral devices without any luck I decided to buy a new motherboard, CPU, RAM etc.

I ended up with a Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5, running a AMD Phenom 9850 and 4GB of Corsair RAM. I choose a low end videocard, Sapphire Radeon HD 2400, since I'm not much of a gamer anymore.

The Radeon card seems to be non-compliant with my Dell 20" monitor, and refuses to display an image using DVI cable. I got it working with a S-VHS cable, but the graphics are horrible. I see that Sapphire has released a new BIOS for the videocard claiming to "(...)fix bug with Samsung DVI-D(...)". Hopefully it'll also work with my DVI-D monitor.

Flashing a BIOS isn't always straightforward. Finding out HOW you flash, that is.
After googling around I found a way to flash my motherboards BIOS, and I'll put the receipe here for my own future reference.

I tried using the @BIOS application to flash the Gigabyte card. Didn't work. Couldn't connect to any of the online servers.

I also tried the ActiveX driven Download Center on the Gigabyte website. No luck.

Here is what I ended up with:
1. Download new BIOS from MA790FX-DS5 page. My old BIOS was F5, and the newest available was F6.
2. Extracted the files onto a floppy disk.
3. Rebooted computer and pressed END to get to QFlash application.
4. Choose floppy drive, and the .F6 file.
Flashing complete.

Now for finding out how to flash the ROM on the Radeon card.