I feel compelled to journal a computer problem I had recently, and what I had to go through to fix it, so that it might be Googled and other people might be saved the days of frustration and loss of productivity that I went through whilst trying to figure it all out.

Warning, this is technical and will be exceedingly boring to you unless you are having the same problem.

How I buggered the BIOS up in the first place
My computer has an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. Recently I noticed that a newer BIOS (version 1013) had been out for a few months, so I downloaded and installed it. Yeah yeah, don’t update your BIOS unless it is absolutely necessary, etc. Caution is for chumps.

I did some other things and then rebooted. Windows would not load, however, getting to a point in the loading process (MUP.SYS) at which point the computer would suddenly restart. I thought, “what have I installed recently that might affect Windows?” The only other thing I had done was to re-install Adaptec ASPI driver, as I’d accidentally inserted a copy-controlled audio CD which had quietly removed my computer’s ability to rip CDs.

Pretty cute, EMI, but I’m still going to rip your CDs, so cop it sweet.

I went with the BIOS theory, and long story short, I put the old BIOS file onto a diskette and rebooted. On post, you can press ALT-F2 and it will allow you to flash the BIOS from a file on A: drive. I’d suspected that my A: drive was unreliable, but I figured, if the file doesn’t read properly, the checksum won’t match and the flash program won’t let me proceed, at which point I can just try again until it does read properly.

The problem is, of course, that the flash program reads the file twice—once to check it, and if the check passes, it goes ahead and flashes your BIOS straight from disk. You guessed it, my floppy disk drive choked on the second one.

Back to Bootblock
Upon reboot, I was stuck with the Bootblock, the small bit at the very beginning of the BIOS that doesn’t generally get overwritten, that gives you one more chance: put in a floppy disk containing the flash program (AWDFLASH.EXE) and the BIOS file (something like C18E1013.BIN) and it will restore your BIOS back to its pristine condition.

So, after I installed a brand new floppy disk drive ($20.00), I used someone else’s computer to download the necessary files and put them onto disk. Sure enough, it went ahead and loaded the flash program, which led me to the next problem.

“Source File Not Found”
No matter what I called the BIOS file, awdflash kept saying “Source File Not Found”, and freezing up. I even tried something in the manual about calling it A7N8X-E.ROM, but no luck there.

But the error message is misleading. After much Googling, I discovered that it doesn’t matter what you call the BIOS file. The AWDFLASH.EXE on the diskette has to have come from the CD that came with the motherboard; versions available for download from the ASUS site are probably different and will not work. They were indeed different files, and using the correct one made the spurious error message go away, which led me to the next problem.

BIOS-Lock String…?
After analysing the BIOS file, the flash program declared that “The program file’s BIOS-Lock String does not match with your system!” I had no idea what on Earth that meant, so I repeated the process with several different older versions of the BIOS file only to get the exact same error message each time, then I gave up and set up my Linux router as a desktop machine so I could get things done.

The thing that saved me here was a technique I found on a bulletin board discussion, to make a DOS boot disk and add a fake Awdflash to it in order to “trick” the Bootblock loader into giving you a DOS command prompt for whatever you may need it for, such as running your own choice of flash utility. Uniflash seemed to be highly recommended, so I put that on the diskette, but it was useless to me as it reported my BIOS as being write protected, and at any rate is not recommended for nForce2 chipsets.

Anyway, the thing that finally got the BIOS back in tip top shape was to put the real AWDFLASH.EXE (the one from the mobo CD) onto the diskette under a different name, as that name is already taken by the fake program, and to run it with the /nbl option:

flash.exe /nbl C18E1013.BIN

This worked and the flash proceeded without a hitch, and now I am back to the problem of Windows not loading. But I am working on it, and I don’t have to send hardware and dollars to ASUS.

I am guessing that the /nbl option ensures the flash program doesn’t attempt to flash the Boot Block, or something like that. So is the BIOS-Lock String a mechanism that stops you from overwriting the Boot Block? I have nfi, but where was all this security when I nearly fried my PC in the first place?