Have any of you ever tryed to flash your bios? If not dont ever try it unless you have 2 of the same bios chips.

::My story::
Last night I was testing some new things on my test computer and I figured Id install a new Maxtor 40GB HDD since my old Segate 10GB HDD wasnt cutting it anymore. I fdisked the Maxtor installed win98 for testing and rebooted. After the install was done and the PC booted to the oh so painfull colors of windows I noticed somthing weird. I only had 7.5GB of Hard drive space when I clearly told it to do a partishion of max. Well I figured I must have done somthing wrong so I fdisked it again and looked at what the max showed. It displayed only 7.8GB the first thing I though was why the hell would maxtor place a 8GB HDD in a 40GB box then I got to thinking maby the HDD is bad. Well after a few hours of tinkering with fdisk and reading google and posting on tech forms I found out most old and sometimes new BIOS chips do not support more then 8GB hard drives. So the first thing I did was go to my mother boards site and look up my Bios info. I found out I could flash my bios to fix this issue with only reading 8GB. So I downloaded the ROM file and the ROM programmer and placed them on a windows boot disk. Simple enough so far right? Well the fun was about to start.

Iv never really gotten into software flashing so it was a bit new to me but I have done flashing with bios flash kits (Flash kit- A tool that allows you to place a Bios chip in a socket and reprogram it). Anyway I started by placing my newly made boot disk into the PC and booting to pure DOS. Once I was in DOS I ran the flash program with the rom and was welcomed with my first of many error messages "Rom is incorrect size"! after 1 min of looking over the files I noticed I had the wrong flash writer so I downloaded the correct one ran it and got a few new errors "Module not found", "Chipset not found", "rom incorrect size" "please check to see if chmos is protected". After seeing these 3 errors I was getting a bit pissed off since the mobo's site said it would be simple and easy assuming I fallowed there steps which I did. After looking over chmos to see if it was protected (it wasnt) I tryed the flash program again in DOS. Same errors same everything.

This is when I started to take what the mobos site said and through it out the window. I noticed some things in the flash programmers DOS gui, things that showed chip sets, module sets and info. I picked my chipset along with my module and bios version then clicked "GO" it gave the same errors as before and simple did nothing. So I had just about enough of this and figured I didnt really need the HDD after all on this computer so I exited the program and went back to DOS where I powered down. After a few hours of taking a brake and eating I came back and tryed to boot the test PC. I was in shock to find out my BIOS went currupt after not even writing anything. All I got was a black screen and non-stop beeping over and over again. I noticed POST (power on self test), chmos was gone. they obviously got currupted on the BIOS chip. So I shut the computer down and yelled f*ck thinking what a b*tch its gonna be to hot flash it with another bios chip.

So the lesson I lerned. Dont flash a rom chip unless you really really really have to. If you have a hard drive thats bigger then the suppoted Bios and MOBO and you know nothing about flashing DO NOT even attempt to try this. I at least knew hardware, programming and flashing and im even having a bitch of a time.

If you do want to flash your bios make shore you have a 2nd bios chip thats the exact same (same power use, version, make, model). If you mess up like I do simple search for hot flash and you can see some great help tutorials to get you back on your feet or simple just use the 2nd bios chip.

just thought Id post this here for anyone thats ever notice there HDD wasnt showing the full space or they just want to know about bios.

Yeah, flashing a bitch. Its either simple and done or straight up broke. :nod: I've flashed a couple motherboards before, but I was lucky and the instructions from the manufacturer were right on and the files were up to date. I think you can get around the 8GB hdd limit by booting from your win xp disk and using it's menu to partion it in NTFS tho. But I guess it all depends on the hardware. I hate hardware troubleshooting. -_-

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

ya it dosnt matter the OS I did happen to try linux and Free BSD and ran into the same 8GB bug. So it was clearly the BIOS. I just hotflashed it with another and everything worked out ok since the chmos was already currupt there wasnt anything telling me "check your chmos for protection" haha. It was basicly writing to a blank chip.

Gotta love old hardware. My bios chip was made in 1995 and the version was 1995 so it had to be done somtime.