Warning: Flashing bios with Asus Updater is scary!

[Hot'n'Chilly]

I flashed my P6T to new bios today and it was absolutely horrible. It worked, but I almost had a heart attack. First it went to restart and never went back into windows, just a back screen it hung in. Then it wouldn't respond to the power or restart button on the case. So I turned it off by unplugging it and it booted to bios but said "NO OPERATING SYSTEM" on a plain black screen after POST. Finally I looked in the BIOS settings and discovered that it hadn't kept my RAID setting, which made me go back and set it from IDE to RAID. Then, like magic, it worked fine. But for my very first flash it was terrible to go through. I was sure I bricked the motherboard several times.

[firebane]

Anyone knows to never update a bios in windows.

Always from dos or the asus bios program.

[Hot'n'Chilly]

Wasn't recognising my usb drive... had no choice.

[firebane]

Build a bootable cd with dos command and bios on cd :P

Lots of ways.

[slim142]

Maybe because of the USB flash drive format (FAT, FAT32 etc)

I dont know why ASUS Update is still around and getting "updated" (if it can be called like that). Is one really bad program.

[CryptiK]

Hehe welcome to 2006 ;) Asus update has killed so many boards, everyone knows not to use it. DOS flash it if you cant use a flash drive for some reason.

[Dalten]

Hehe welcome to 2006 ;) Asus update has killed so many boards, everyone knows not to use it. DOS flash it if you cant use a flash drive for some reason.

I know flashing through windows is not the ideal way, and I wouldn't do it on anyone but my own stuff, but in all my boards over the years dating back to celeron 300a's, i've never had a dead board with using a windows flash program when available. I just make sure i'm not unstable before I flash it. I've only killed one board from a BIOS update and that was an Abit P3 era board using a DOS boot disk.

I've flashed by P5Q about half with Asus Update and half with the one built into the BIOS and each tme works great. I think maybe people have such bad experiences with windows flashing because they don't realize their systems are unstable in some way when they start to flash it. I can't prove it, but my own experience tells me it's fairly safe to do, but not the ideal method.

[Wotcher]

Asus update works just fine in a 32bit environment, the problems start when using it in a 64bit environment.

I never once had a bad flash with a 32bit os on P4PE, P4C800E Deluxe, P5GD1, P5K, P5E3

[Leeghoofd]

Think you overexagerated slightly on the title here... :p

Did you reset everything to default settings before the flash ? ofcourse you couldn't besides ya OC as otherwise you wouldn't be able to get into windows. What happened to you is what happens to every user using RAID and co...

The no post screen is scary but has happened to me a zillion times with EZ Flash or whatever update tool you use... mostly a power down or battery pop brings the Asus boards back to life...

Flashing in windows environment can be dangerous if you have an unstable rig... one of the reasons many users go for a flash ofcourse...

I boot with one ram stick , default the bios settings and only up Nb and ram voltage accordingly, reboot then I enter EZ flash via the bios.... after first post I reenter bios and verify NB and ram voltage... and setup the RAID...

Did you hook up the USB stick before booting the rig or afterwards ?

[speckled10]

I've flashed 3 times using the ASUS Windows Updater in 64-bit Vista without any problems..

But after hearing these stories.. I dont think I will be again !

[zanzabar]

its only a bad idea of u have a soldered bios chip, if u have a dfi LT/UT then u can get whatever flash tool u want so long as u have a backup chip, asus i guess was to stupid to spend the extra few cents and now gets rmas to deal with bad flashes

u also cant reflash the bios without special ezflash tools if it gets corrupted so its good to have an ezflash disk for asus

[slim142]

Only decent and stable windows BIOS update programs are the ones from Intel. Never had a problem even with an 815i board.

[Toysoldier]

Wasn't recognizing my usb drive... had no choice.

Have you tried setting your usb drive as the first/primary drive in the bios ?

When flashing I always use the utility built into the BIOS. To begin with the built in program didn't work from NTFS drives, or HDD's, but it does now so you can just put the ROM file on any HDD in your system and the built in program can read it.

[Zeus]

Doesn't scare me, i've done it often and it never went wrong once.

Did it on a number of boards and always overclocked!

Hehe, i know i'm stubborn but it worked great everytime.

Asus update is extremely slow but works ok, i prefer EZ-flash nowadays but wouldn't hesitate to use Asus update if nothing else worked.

[cky2k6]

Nothing particularly bad happened to you, I had the exact same chain of events as you and I was using ez flash from the bios (different board, but similar enough), reboot after flash caused a no post, power button didn't work, and then had to set the hard drives back to raid...

[Movieman]

Listen to the guys here and only flash bios thru DOS..
NEVER thru windows..

[zanzabar]

why only dos why not the included tool from the bios that most boards have

[cmay119]

why only dos why not the included tool from the bios that most boards have

There are a lot more things that COULD go wrong when booted into windows, instead of just booting to a simple DOS utility for the BIOS update.