BIOS-Kill · 501 days ago
Don't try this at home...
kevpattkhp: hey
kevpattkhp: HEY!!!
kevpattkhp: hey, when you see this, I have a story to tell you that will blow your mind
kevpattkhp: brb
adamreiswig: ok
adamreiswig: blow my mind :-)
adamreiswig: kaboom, they set us up the bomb :-):-)
kevpattkhp: you there?
kevpattkhp: so this time I set myself up the bomb
adamreiswig: yeah, what happened?
kevpattkhp: this has to be the all-time stupidest thing I've ever done to a computer
kevpattkhp: This even tops you plugging in the power cable to my HD upside down...
adamreiswig: oooh, now you have my attention :-)
adamreiswig: :hahahahaha
kevpattkhp: remember I told you I was contemplating flashing a beta bios?
adamreiswig: oh brother, I warned you !!!!!
kevpattkhp: yeah, you did
adamreiswig: moron :-)
kevpattkhp: well I had 2 different bioses
kevpattkhp: 1.02 (non-beta) and 1.02b (beta)
kevpattkhp: my system was running 1.01
kevpattkhp: I had downloaded the 2 new ones from tyan's ftp site.
kevpattkhp: anyway...
kevpattkhp: I took your advice and decided not to use the beta version
adamreiswig: ok
kevpattkhp: so I got myself a Win98/DOS boot disk and proceeded to flash
kevpattkhp: while the flash program was reading the rom file from the disk I noticed a model number in the file name ... 2875
kevpattkhp: I thought "that
adamreiswig: uh huh
kevpattkhp: is strange... I thought my mobo was a 2885"
kevpattkhp: and then the flash procedure was done
kevpattkhp: and my system rebooted
kevpattkhp: for the very last time
kevpattkhp: :-(
adamreiswig: oh no
kevpattkhp: I STUPID DOWNLOADED THE WRONG MORON FLASH FILE FOR SOME OTHER MTOHERBOARD!!!
adamreiswig: oh my goodness
adamreiswig: no way of fixin it?
kevpattkhp: a visit back to tyan's site (with my laptop) confirmed this
kevpattkhp: there is no 1.02 for my mobo, only 1.01
adamreiswig: oh brother
kevpattkhp: Anyway, it would not do anything. No beeps, buzzes, boot, video, sound, nothing. Just a power led and total utter silence.
kevpattkhp: MY 500 DOLLAR MOTHERBOARD COMPLETELY TOAST!!!
adamreiswig: surely, tyan can help or something
kevpattkhp: now does that top you frying my HD or what?
adamreiswig: yeah, that stupid hard drive only cost me around $40
kevpattkhp: well I went to their support site and they had 2 outfits that will sell you a new BIOS chip
kevpattkhp: cost is about $30... not too bad I guess, except I would want it shipped overnight cause I wanted to bring my system out this weekend.
kevpattkhp: So that would be more like $50
kevpattkhp: but then I started thinking...
kevpattkhp: this is what will blow your mind
kevpattkhp: btw, did have you ever done a bad flash?
adamreiswig: nope
kevpattkhp: well I made a home-brew chip puller out of a paperclip, and pulled the bad bios chip off my mobo
adamreiswig: yeah?
kevpattkhp: and I thought to myself "how can I reprogram this thing"
adamreiswig: oh brother
kevpattkhp: Then it came to me.
adamreiswig: only you :-)
kevpattkhp: The student Casey, just built an AthlonFX-51 system that is somewhat similar to mine
adamreiswig: same mb?
kevpattkhp: I know the BIOSes look almost the same and they are both Opteron-style systems
kevpattkhp: no different mobo.
adamreiswig: please don't tell me you killed his too??!?!?!?!?
kevpattkhp: Mine is Tyan K8W dual-opteron with AMD8000 chipset, his is ASUS SK8N single-opteron with nForce3 chipset
kevpattkhp: hahaha
kevpattkhp: the "midas touch"
kevpattkhp: This was my plan:
adamreiswig: oh.....my.....goodness.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!
kevpattkhp: His bios chip was probably very similar to mine
adamreiswig: this has got to be your finest hour hahahahahahahahahahaha
kevpattkhp: I could reprogram mine in his system, except his system would of course not boot up with my chip installed
kevpattkhp: so this is what I did:
kevpattkhp: we booted up his system normally (untouched) to my boot floppy
kevpattkhp: THEN, with the power on, we PULLED OUT his BIOS chip and popped mine in
kevpattkhp: and then I ran the flash program off the floppy
kevpattkhp: :-)
kevpattkhp: unbelievably enough, the flash program seemed to work properly, and rebooted his system when it was donw
adamreiswig: you are such an idiot, imho
kevpattkhp: of course I killed the power immediately so his system would not try to boot off my bios
kevpattkhp: then put his back in and powered it on...
kevpattkhp: (smoke test)
adamreiswig: holy cow
kevpattkhp: well it seemed to start up normal (with his chip back in place) except it said "BIOS Checksum incorrect"
kevpattkhp: and it was trying to do some auto-recovery flash procedure asking for a floppy....
kevpattkhp: I was starting to get scared, but honestly, I was glad it was working at all
kevpattkhp: anyway I couldn't see how his flash chip could have been damaged (other than pulling it from his mobo with the power on)
kevpattkhp: so we power-cycled the system a couple times
kevpattkhp: and I re-seated the chip in its socket
kevpattkhp: then it went back to normal and seemed to work fine
kevpattkhp: just for good measure, we flashed his bios with a new CORRECT version for his motherboard and loaded new CMOS settings
kevpattkhp: he booted into windows and everything seemed normal
kevpattkhp: what a relief
kevpattkhp: anyway... so now I had my old chip which MIGHT be correctly programmed for my system again...
adamreiswig: you are soooo unbelieveable :-)
kevpattkhp: so I took it back to my house and popped it into my mobo
adamreiswig: why is your pc answeing the phone??
— Kevin H. Patterson
First Post · 502 days ago
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