First in a while
24 Jul 2004I’d been having a few good months, so I guess it was finally time to destroy a bit of gear. Nothing spectacular, unfortunately. It just went from being marginally fnarked to unbootable – originally, I was getting BIOS checksum errors (but it’d still reluctantly boot from a floppy, although IDE/ATAPI wasn’t anything more than a pipe-dream).
Downloaded FreeDOS, banged on AWDFLASH.EXE and (what it turns out WASN’T) the firmware, plugged it in, got errors. Overrode errors, screen goes black.
Josh says some bad words.
Josh (still in third person) looks at other screen, re-reads bad Taiwanese translation carefully. It turns out that the “latest” firmware under 693A wasn’t actually for that motherboard. God only knows what it WAS for… but me, I have no idea. So, kiddies. The moral of this story is that the /nbl switch for AWDFLASH is evil, and should never be used unless you’re 100% certain that it’s the right firmware, are God, or read Taiwanese.
Grr. I’ll bang the BIOS chip in another computer in a while and flash it with the correct image this time around.