My Experiments with the PC ...... BIOS flash going awry

Well this dates back to the time I was perhaps in my 2nd year of engineering.
My 6 year old monitor had gone bad. So I went out and got myself a cool 19 inch widescreen Samsung flat screen. I had initially planned to get only a 17 inch screen but decided to go for the widescreen one after checking the price difference between them.


So, I come in and plug the beauty to my CPU. The screen glows up and it looks awesome.
But there is something amiss. The screen looks all distended. "Hmm ... Got to do with the widescreen resolution I thought". I went and checked out all the resolutions available. None of them looked fine. On digging further, I found out non of the resolutions available were wide screen(16:10). My immediate thought was.."Driver update".

Upgraded to the latest driver available on the Asus website (my mobo maker). It would not work. Tried different versions..Nothing would work. It did not take me long to realize that nothing would do. Every piece of hardware comes with the firmware that makes it possible for it to talk to other hardware and upper layers of software. Dirver only enables you to speak to this firmware.
In my case, I was running a mobo with on-board graphics and the BIOS did not support widescreen resolutions. And no software upgrade on my OS would fix it.

This meant I had to look for a BIOS upgrade. Asus had stopped releasing updates for my motherboard long back . Even the last BIOS released did not support widescreen resolutions. As you would expect, there was this guy in Finland who had patched the BIOS to support widescreen resolutions. I downloaded it right away.

Now came the difficult part.
I had never done a BIOS upgrade. Back in those days, a BIOS upgrade was considered a thing you would never do.
But I thought, what the hell. This is one part I have never tried on my PC. Come what may, I want to enjoy my new monitor. I am gonna upgrade to the new BIOS.

I was too eager to give a deeper thought.
Off I was to the Asus website, to download the flashing utility.
There were 2 options : Windows flashing utility
A DOS based flashing utility.
I chose the Windows utility. Took a backup of the current BIOS.
I chose the patched BIOS and selected "FLASH".

Next on the screen :


1. Erasing current version a.b.c.d .... Complete
2. Flashing new image version w.x.y.z .. Complete.
3. Verifying image .... Verification failed!.

"Oops..Maybe something went wrong. Let me try it again", I thought.
I did the sequence n number of times. And it would say the same thing everytime.
I knew I was in deep trouble. Atleast I was running Windows and my BIOS would not be rquired till the next reboot. So I started googling for solutions. After 3 hrs of surfing, I realized there was no other go apart from flashing from an external programmer.

And I eventually pressed the shut down button. And as expected, my system would not come back from the next boot.
I called up the supposedly best Computer Service guy and explained what happened.
He asked me to get the system over. I clearly told him that I just needed an external programmer to re-flash it.
But after 3 days of waiting, this guy tells me. Sir, the Display Chip is damaged and that is why the system is not booting up.
I argued enough to explain what the problem was.
I was cursing myself for taking the system to him.
I got back the system immediately.

I then called up Asus support . Atleast the engineer there clearly understood the problem. But due to my misfortune, my mobo was very old and they did not have any programmers or my mobo model.

If they had one, I could have something called hot swapping.
So, what exactly is hot swapping.
Well it is basically taking the bios from a non-booting system where the bios flash went bad or was the wrong version and reflashing it on a working system that has a compatible chip.

I even went to the extent of calling up the vendor who had supplied my PC to check if anyone else had got the same system around that time so that I could flash my BIOS chip on his system. I reached a dead end again.

Eventually, I had to contact a person who was involved in Chip level service to get it flashed.
The fix was a matter of 5 minutes. All I needed was the external programmer.
And I had to shell out 500Rs for it .

Later I came to know that most of the old motherboards shipped with faulty programmers.

So the next time around you want to flash the BIOS of your old system, ask yourself ..
"Do I really need this BIOS upgrade??"

Well, if you are running a reasonably new machine, there is no reason for worry.
Asus motheroards now ship with something called Crash Free BIOS and Gigabyte mobos have dual BIOS chips so that you can boot from the other when 1 crashes. And every motherboard vendor now has one or the other thing to handle Bios flashes going awry.
In fact, I have flashed my new Asus P6T Deluxe several times and never ever faced an issue.

I have to mention that I have left out many specifics in this article to keep it concise....