BIOS backup takes long

Hey guys,

I'm planning to flash the BIOS on an older system to overcome the 2Gb limit
it has for hard drives. I'm not too familiar with this, so a making a BIOS
backup first seems like a pretty good idea.

It's an Award bios on a Soltek SL-54P5 motherboard, I have a boot disk with
awdflash and an appropriate .bin on it. However, making a backup with
"awdflash a:\biosbak.bin /sy /pn" seems to take quite some time. After ten
minutes, it still doesn't seem to have done anything. After a reset, I find
a "biosbak.bin" file on the diskette, but it's empty. Is this normal?

Thanks,
Wald

I've done at least 20 flashes on various boards. The backup portion (when
I've done it) doesn't usually take more than a minute or two. The whole
process takes less than 3 - 4 minutes. Let me suggest making a new startup
disk and recopying the awardflash file (or even downloading it from the mb
maker's website ) and adding the new bin file to the disk. Read the
directions for flashing and follow them verbatim. And no, there really
should be a backup file sitting on the disk when all is done.
Good luck
--
Jan Alter
bearpuf@verizon.net
or
jalter@phila.k12.pa.us
"Wald" <arnout.standaert@n-o_s-p-a-m.cit.kuleuven.ac.be> wrote in message
news:Xns96EF5A8BC6ABEarnoutstandaertnospa@134.58.1 27.12...
> Hey guys,
>
> I'm planning to flash the BIOS on an older system to overcome the 2Gb
> limit
> it has for hard drives. I'm not too familiar with this, so a making a BIOS
> backup first seems like a pretty good idea.
>
> It's an Award bios on a Soltek SL-54P5 motherboard, I have a boot disk
> with
> awdflash and an appropriate .bin on it. However, making a backup with
> "awdflash a:\biosbak.bin /sy /pn" seems to take quite some time. After ten
> minutes, it still doesn't seem to have done anything. After a reset, I
> find
> a "biosbak.bin" file on the diskette, but it's empty. Is this normal?
>
> Thanks,
> Wald

Bad floppy disk, maybe.

--
WebWalker
email: webwalker@bluebottle.com

I've done several secessful flashes & only once has the option popped up to
give me the option to back the old one up.
I don't worry about it at all. Be confident that it'll work & if it doesn't
they usually have details how to recover from "bad flash".


"WebWalker" <webwalker@bluebottle.com> wrote in message
news:895vk19gnj3sub0mr87vdgm5b096n9l8lu@4ax.com...
> Bad floppy disk, maybe.
>
> --
> WebWalker
> email: webwalker@bluebottle.com

Wald <arnout.standaert@n-o_s-p-a-m.cit.kuleuven.ac.be> wrote:

<snip>

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. The basic problem boiled down to
an "Unknown flash type" error. I was using v8.18 of awdflash.exe, I
switched to v7.90 and this one *was* able to flash the BIOS
correctly with the same .bin file.

Thanks for the help.

Wald