Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Upgrade A7N8X Deluxe

Opened a can of worms. The PSU died, and after fixing that I decided to make the Mitsumi 'all in one' floppy/media card reader work. No dice. Gave up on that after fiddling with the connector & motherboard. Then I had the bright idea to reinstall that Seagate 120GB SATA drive. Grrr. Stupid, stupid. I should have left the thing alone after fixing the PSU because I reset the BIOS and wasn't completely sure of the settings and so...

I was getting the intermittent blue screen of death.

Frack. Well I fiddled and farted with it until I figured out how to upgrade the SATA BIOS. Grabbed BIOS 1008-D.bin from the ASUS web page, along with the AWDFLASH.ZIP utility and CBROM. I have the A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, Socket A, rev 2.0. Went to the Silicon Image web page and fetched the latest SATA BIOS image, BIO-003112-xxx-4284.zip

Go find a floppy and do a format a: from the command line just to make sure the thing is OK. Then use Windows Explorer to format it and make it bootable.

Now to make the BIOS. Created a directory sata_bios and unpacked the zipped files there. Then used cbrom215 1008-D.bin /pci 4284.bin from the command line to compile in the new SATA BIOS into the ASUS BIOS. Use cbrom215 1008-D.bin /D to verify that PCI ROM[A] now has the latest SATA version. Copy 1008-D.bin and awdflash.exe to the floppy. Close everything, insert the floppy and reboot.

Once the A: drive is booted up, flash the motherboard: awdflash 1008-d.bin /py/sn My BIOS flashed in a few minutes and I removed the floppy, pressed F1 and Windows XP Pro SP2 fired right up. Was able to read and write to the SATA drive. Am now running Prime95 and Motherboard Monitor 5. The Prime95 is running in torture test mode, seems fine. MBM reports the CPU is at 41C which seems fine to me.