CAUTION : DO NOT USE LIVE UPDATE OR WINFLASH TO UPGRADE THE BIOS!

Question

Hello,
I've been having trouble with my MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard a few weeks now.
My system configuration is not heavy at all and consists of
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum nForce3 Ultra
AMD64 Venice (E6) 3200+
2 x 512Mb DDR400 Geil RAM 2.5-2-2-5 in dual channel configuration
VGA ASUS 9600XT/128/TVD
SB Audigy Value
1 x HDD Maxtor 200GB 7200rpm
1 x DVD-RW Pioneer 107D
PSU Addtronics 420W (12V 18A)
2 case fans 12cm
2 USB devices (Joysticks)
Here are the facts:
1. The system was working great from mid-July until mid-September.
2. I always close down the PSU power when turning off the computer at night (when I turn it off) in order to have come protection over our crappy power service.
3. One morning, when trying to turn the PC on, I followed the normal procedure I did each time. PSU ON, waiting a few secs, Power button ON.
That morning, the PC did not boot.  The monitor still displayed 'No Signal' but I could hear the fans working.  I was ready to leave for work so I just shut it down to
investigate after work in the afternoon.
4. To my surpice, and without doing anything at all, when I tried to turn it on that evening it fired up just fine!!!!
5. A couple of days later, same thing. No boot, no post, no video signal.  This time I had the time so I started investigating:
Checking the D-Bracket at the back it was Red-Red-Red-Green, which I found out from the manual meant 'Initilization of VGA'... I thought my VGA just died,
so I shut down the PC, removed the power, took out the 9600XT and put in an older nVidia Ti4200 VGA I had spare.
6. The system fired up normally!!!  Ok, I say... The VGA must be the problem.   Let's test it. I installed the 9600XT on another PC and it worked fine!
Oh... So it's not the VGA at fault!
7. Once again I replaced the Ti4200 back to my prefered 9600XT.  Pushed the power... No good... No post, no boot, no video...
8 Replaced 9600XT with the Ti4200... Everything worked!.... I started to get worried. WHY doen't the ATI card works and the nVidia does ?
Consiracy theory immediately crossed my mind.
9. I have spend more than a month to find the cause of this.  I posted to this forum for help, but best suggestion was to replace my PSU as not enough.
420W not enough for a bare minimum PC?  I mean.. Come on!?!?!?... I calculated with the proposed PSU calulator what I needed and I would be fine
even with a 350W PSU and 12A on the 12V rail!.  I had 18A... And some recommended to get a PSU with 30A on 12V !!!!!
That means that I had to spend another 150Euros to get a new PSU while it was not needed!??!  In brief.. yes.
The problem was elsewhere as I found out.
Searching and reading in this forum I found out that a lot of people have the same problem as I did.  Most of them indeed had weak PSUs and needed
more power.  But there were a few that should be fine.
What I found common to all those cases was that there was either an ATI Radeon VGA or an nVidia 6800 involved!
And in almost all the cases the user did a bios upgrade just before the problem started.
Well, that it!... the BIOS upgrade.  I tried to remember and finally did, that I started having these problems after I used the LiveUpdate function to update
the BIOS of the motherboard to 1.9 and once again to 1.b.   But both times I did it from within windows using the winflash utility and the default options.
It seems that the default options did not flash the whole bios.  They left out the boot section.  As a result the system booted ok with the nVidia Ti4200,
an older generation card, but NOT with the ATI 9600XT which was newer generation.
What I did is to reflash the bios using a startup floppy and following the instructions found here : https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=86257.0
After the setup boots etc, I powered down the PC, replaced once again the Ti4200 with the required 9600XT and the system power up and booted fine!
It's running rock stable since then (48hrs already), but I have yet to see if the problem will appear again, as it only happened from a cold boot and not
during a restart or anything.  I hope it will be ok.
So, I'm writting this as a warning.
Take caution and do not upgrade your BIOS from within windows. It's better to spend a couple more minutes to prepare a start up floppy and upgrade
from there, that to have problems later.
Regards,
George D.
Athens, Hellas

Answer 1

Quote from: Deeez on 07-November-05, 20:05:41
Load your bios off the hardrive. <-------FAIL SAFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not true.
File read operation can fail mid-flash. I agree this is safer that running the exe off a floppy, but it is not as safe as flashing from a RAMDrive (as per JayBee), which doesn't rely on a read from any media across any kind of BUS. Plus the RAMDrive needs no such partition on the HD so why bother with the hassle?
Flash from RAMDrive is not fail safe either of course but when run on a PC with a UPS that's about as safe as anyone can get.