How can I flash the BIOS on a dead PCI-E Gfx card?

[yekim]

New problem so I thought I'd try it in a new thread/title:

 

I have a dead PCI-E video card (BIOS needs reflashing)

 

When I remove my PCI-E Gfx card I can boot to DOS/Win using my PCI vga card. With my PCI-E card installed, it hangs with 1 LED (presumably since the 6800GT firmware is crapt). I can't do the reflash because the sys hangs when the PCI-E card is inserted.

 

In the BIOS, I have 'Display Init' set to PCI. But it still hangs. How can I force the BIOS to post using the PCI card, instead of the PCI-E?

 

TIA

[red930]

Have you tried both PCI-E slots yet? What did you do to that card, if you don't mind me asking? Tried flashing the Ultra bios?

[yekim]

Have you tried both PCI-E slots yet? What did you do to that card, if you don't mind me asking? Tried flashing the Ultra bios?

 

 

Yah I tried booting to the PCI card with it the PCI-E in the top slot, and then later tried with PCI-E in the bottom slot. Do you think I should try a different PCI slot for the vga card? Its in the bottom-most now.

 

 

Here is the long story:

 

I have a 7800GT in another system. I was having some problems, and the eVGA guys said to update the BIOS. My (now dead) rig is the one with the floppy drive, so I downloaded the eVGA 7800GT BIOS update onto this system. I got distracted from updating the 7800GT, and still had the boot disk in my drive.

 

On my dead system, I rebooted to install some memory I got back from its 2nd RMA (thanks Mushkin :mad: ) and walked away. When the system booted it automatically booted from the boot disk and started the BIOS update (7800GT != 6800GT). By the time I came back and saw what happened, it already said:

 

"Original BIOS cleared"

 

"Storing new BIOS"

" . . . . . . . . . . "

 

I said "." and realized it was too late - if I rebooted now the BIOS would still be corrupt. So, this is the situation you find me in. To make matters worse, I have a Zalman heatsink installed on 6800GT, which I've come to find out has voided my double-lifetime warranty ... DOH!

 

Thanks for your help

Yek

[CPDMF]

You can either pick up a cheap pci card to have video so you can flash the card or you can do a blind flash by just giving it time to boot off your floppy and then enter the flash commands. I flashed the wrong bios to an X800 and was able to blind flash back.

[red930]

If you have your stock cooler for that 6800GT i would put it back on and request for an RMA. If you can't boot with that PCI-E card (6800GT) in anyway then there is not much you can do at this point i would think. Always keep your stock cooler aside just incase you run into these situations. How would they know you took off the cooler anyhow, get my point?

[yekim]

Hey guys, just an update. Problem solved, for the record here is what I had to do (part for my own record, part in case someone else has this prob):

 

> Note: the 'Boot PCI first' feature in the DFI BIOS seems to be broken (at least in 6-23-05 and the newest 3-30-06) < Maybe someone can confirm this?

 

I had to use NVFlash 5.10 (not 5.25 which I think is the newest, it didn't work). I used the BIOS I found on the MVKtech site (Thanks Mack27).

 

I removed my dead card from my comp and put into another sys with an Asus mobo.

Changed BIOS on Asus to boot PCI first

Got to MS-DOS boot disk with PCI card

Ran:

A: nvflash -4 -5 -6 XFX6800.ROM

BIOS updated

 

My problem before was NVflash 5.25 would not allow me to flash the wrong bios to the wrong board (NVFlash thought my board was a 7800GT :-( ). So I had to roll back to 5.10.

 

The -4, -5, and -6 ignores all card ID mismatches and board mismatch.