Upgrades from Hell : Bios!

A little one this time.

A while ago I wrote about how I upgraded my hardware and moved to Windows 2000 Professional (upgrades from hell, see www.pcug.org.au/~dac)

Well Win2000Pro has been pretty damned solid. It runs all the games I've thrown at it (and I assure you, that's a lot of games), and I'm impressed with the stability of the O/S. It doesn't run out of resources (that I've noticed), and it doesn't need a reboot every day or so in order to stop crashing. So I'm sold on it as a valid replacement for Windows 98.

Val has been complaining about constant crashes on her machine, which takes the machine down and it needs to be restarted. I suggested Windows 2000 Pro, but that she would need 128MB more memory. Well we got the memory the other week and popped it in (5 minute job, no drama for once), and she's been running with 256MB for a few weeks. Whilst the frequency of crashes is lower, it still crashes enough to make her cross and bothered.

So after much umming and ahing, today was the day to install Windows 2000 Pro on her machine.

I chose to do the Dual Boot approach, so that if the Win2000 install stuffed up, Val could just boot up in Windows 98 and carry on as though nothing had happened.

Prior to doing the 'upgrade', I got Val to save all of her user data from programs like Outlook and Excel, as well as saving the contents of the Windows registry so that we could get access to keys and stuff without having to boot up into Windows 98.

That done, we put in the Windows 2000 Professional Upgrade CD, and away it went. Chose to dual boot, it installed a few files, and reset the machine.

First problem (and the main one of the day), no mouse pointer. Val uses a Microsoft Ballpoint mouse, which is a trackball affair hanging off the side of the keyboard. This means she can use her thumb to navigate the mouse pointer, and not hurt her wrists like she would with a normal mouse. Well the mouse was steadfastly refusing to 'mouse'; navigating the setup with keyboard was a chore, but we did it, until the install locked up for no reason. No matter, we just powered off the machine, and rebooted.

Again, back into setup, and still no mouse. Scratch head. This time we let it go do it's stuff without changing at the bit where it hung (Country selection), and the O/S did it's install, and set itself up.

Come the real boot, up it comes, but no mouse. Check the device manager, and the serial ports were -duplicated-. I deleted all the serial ports, restarted. Up it comes, but no mouse. By this time I'm getting shat off with having to do keyboard navigation, so I unplug the mouse from my trusty linux box, which is a PS/2 one (the ballpoint is serial), and plug that in, shut down, come up, I have a mouse!

Then I go to work trying to make the system recognise the serial ports, nothing I did made any difference. I tried installing different serial port drivers, I tried changing the IRQ information in the motherboard BIOS, and I generally tried everything. To no avail.

Without her Ballpoint mouse, Val was not going to be able to use the system. Boot back into Windows 98 and the mouse worked fine, so I know that the hardware is working.

Go do some web investigation about the motherboard. It's an ASUS MEZ-M motherboard, Socket 370 Celeron, Intel chipset. Adequate for Val's purposes. Go to the ASUS site, and find that there has been a BIOS upgrade, from 1008 to 1010. Download the BIOS file, and download the latest ASUS "AFLASH" utility (1.32)

Go to Windows 2000 and try to run the AFLASH program from a command prompt. Bzzt, it doesn't run under Windows 32.

Ok. I remember flashing my ASUS A7V with two different BIOS upgrades, and I did that under native Win2K mode. Hunt down AsusUpdate, and try to install that on Val's machine BZZZT, motherboard version not supported for the AsusUpdate program. Back to AFLASH.

Grab a trusty Win98 boot floppy, boot up, run AFLASH, and get a nice message stating that the FLASH memory is of type 'UNKNOWN'. According to the web site, if the flash memory is UNKNOWN the AFLASH code will not be able to function. Grrr.

Check the BIOS again, and confirm that Bios Update is enabled (you can turn it off so that malicious viruses can't flash your BIOS accidently). Try again, no go. Pull out hair, moan a little. Boot machine up in Win98 and say to Val 'you do something else for a while whilst I do some research'

So I played a game of hearts (got to #5 on Cases Ladder (HEARTS, ZONE)), and then went into a marathon web search effort, using Google web and Googol's Deja archive (gosh, it's so much faster than Deja ever was!)

Found a bunch of threads about UNKNOWN Flash ROM and AFLASH, and some mentions that there are other versions of AFLASH around, and some of them are BAD.

Well I checked my version, and it was the latest (1.32), but just in cases, I downloaded it again from another FTP site -- exactly same file size, same 1.32. Sheesh.

Then I read that AFLASH doesn't like EMM (extended memory managers), and that you shouldn't boot up with a autoexec.bat or config.sys file. So I got Val to create a system disk (format a: /s) from Windows 98 command.com, and sent her away to make phone calls to relatives and friends. Tried booting with the raw boot floppy, run AFLASH, and no go.

The AFLASH program just didn't know what kind of BIOS EEPROM I had.

I went back to Deja and did more searching for AFLASH.EXE and found a British site that had a local copy of version 1.24 of AFLASH -- so I snaffled that and gave that a go.

THESE LINKS NO LONGER WORK. I don't know why

Here is a local copy of the 1.24 of AFLASH
aflash2.exe (82Kbytes)

BINGO!

The AFLASH utility recognised the motherboard BIOS EEPROM, and I was able to flash it.

Reboot, restore default settings in BIOS, boot up in Windows, and no mouse.

:-(

But whilst I was trying to get to Device Manager with the clunky keyboard shortcuts, I was suddenly presented with a 'Installing Microsoft Ballpoint Mouse' dialog box, and a prompt to restart the system -- complete with mouse pointer that worked!

So my problem had been the BIOS all along. Weird.

Val is now running Win2000Pro, finding out stuff left right and centre, and having the usual stress of trying to find/install programs.

I have to go and help her install Office now, that will be a piece of cake! (famous last words).

I hope this helps others in a similar situation. Big Boos to ASUS for screwing up their latest AFLASH routine.

Back to Dac's home page
back to PCUG home page
Hand Coded by Dac.