VanLUG Email Archive
Ian Morey (ian@mindlink.com)
Mon, 10 Jan 2000 01:48:40 -0800
At 04:58 PM 09/01/00 -0800, you wrote:
>I tried running AWDFLASH.EXE on my BE6 mainboard, and it backed up the
>old bios, and then sat there with the floppy light on, with the error
>status saying 'PLEASE WAIT'. I have waited 15 minutes sofar with no
>change. Is the flash hooped, or should I just be more patient?
Hi Ya'akov;
You are having the worst luck lately. Flashing an Abit usually
takes about 20 seconds, and you can find the AWDFLASH.EXE in the downloads
/ utilities section of the web site, or more precisely;
http://www.abit-usa.com/english/download/index.htm
If you had any sort of memory managers loaded it won't flash
properly, though it usually refuses to do anything, rather than half of
something.
The newest BIOS for the BE6 fixes the CPU ID issue in regards to
the P-!!! 600, and the BIOS release before that fixes a hang problem on
boot if the ESCD record is incorrect. If you had "force ESCD update"
enabled in your BIOS, that might be why it was hanging on a soft reboot...
perhaps... just a quick speculation on my part.
Hopefully you got the BIOS for the correct motherboard, there
being a BE6 and a BE6-II with quite different BIOSs, mixing and matching
that would be a no-no.
In my experience... I've flashed my Abit BH6 3 times, my Abit BP6
7 times, my FIC about 4 times, and an ASUS K7 once this year. I haven't had
any problems with any of them. I flashed my BP6 3 times in one day, playing
with different ATA-66 controller BIOS/driver combos, without any scares or
problems.
If you want a different make of motherboard go for an
AOpen, Chaintec, Soyo or Asus. Microstar aren't necessarily the best ones
out there, (though they certainly aren't bad). The Aopen AXBC Pro is
supposed to be the most stable of the BX motherboards. Speed between boards
isn't much of an issue these days, they're all within a few percent of each
other. BIOS tweaks, and the rest of the system used will have more effect
on speed than switching the motherboard around. Of course, you may have
just got an Abit board with a bad BIOS chip on it, which would explain a
lot. But Ya'akov, if you want to crunch numbers, get an Athlon and an Asus
mobo. :-)
I'm really sorry that you have been having so many troubles, and
have had to be so frustrated by these stupid machines. Sometimes, I think
they know what they're doing, and are laughing at us poor humans.... makes
me itch for the blow-torch. ;-) Too bad we couldn't have beat that problem.
Cheers,
Ian
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Mon 10 Jan 2000 - 09:50:17