Flashing the A8V Deluxe rev2 BIOS

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kristoffer · Post by **kristoffer** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:25 pm

I'm in need of upgrading my A8V Deluxe rev2 BIOS in order to get Cool'n'Quiet/PowerNow! to work properly. Asus only provides with a win32 binary for flashing the BIOS on the A8Vs (and apparently all of their new motherboards), namely ASUS WinFlash. The problem is, I don't have Windows installed on my system, nor do I own the means to install it (i.e. the installation discs). Add to that that I wouldn't want to install it anyway, especially not for such a silly thing as flashing my BIOS! I mean, you have to be crazy if you want to do that from a windows environment.

So, I wonder, are there any other ways to flash my BIOS with the image that can be obtained from asus' website? Like a good ol' DOS flasher that can be run from FreeDOS or a bootable MSDOS floppy (I'm sure I can get my hands on one of those from some of my Windows using friends)? Perhaps AFLASH can be used, although asus don't mention anything about it?

niskel · Post by **niskel** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:37 pm

Check section 4 pages 1 to 3 of you A8V Deluxe User Guide that came with your motherboard.
Download Manual
DOS Flasher

kristoffer · Post by **kristoffer** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:53 pm

niskel wrote:Check section 4 pages 1 to 3 of you A8V Deluxe User Guide that came with your motherboard.
Download Manual
DOS Flasher

Oh, thanks! The EZ Flash thingie seems to be even EZier than using the DOS flasher, so I'll try that one instead.

nukem996 · Post by **nukem996** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:37 pm

I also have an ASUS motherboard and ive always wondered how hard would it be to create a program that flashes the bios on linux.

tgh · Post by **tgh** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 6:37 am

I recently went through the pain of flashing an A8V on a system that didn't have Windows installed. I'm going to say that I ended up using the MSDOS 7.1 boot diskette to flash my unit. You can probably grab those boot disks from one of these URLs.

http://www.bootdisk.com/
http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/15867.html

The biggest problem that I ran into... the DOS boot diskette took roughly an *hour* before it got to the "A:>" prompt. Before that, I just had a blank screen with no real information that anything was happening. So be extra patient when you're trying to boot to the DOS diskette to patch the BIOS.

Once you get to the prompt, it's pretty easy to use the AFUDOS utility to patch your BIOS.

widan · Post by **widan** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 1:43 pm

nukem996 wrote:I also have an ASUS motherboard and ive always wondered how hard would it be to create a program that flashes the bios on linux.

Writing such tools (and especially testing them) is a pain (and a bit risky for the "testing" part - and even if you have some way to reprogram the flash chip off-board if something goes wrong, it's still a pain). One model of motherboard can use different flash chips depending on what's available when it's produced. And each brand of flash chips has its own way of unlocking/erasing/locking sectors, so the flashing tools need to handle quite a lot of cases. Hopefully there are not that many flash manufacturers.

tgh wrote:the DOS boot diskette took roughly an *hour* before it got to the "A:>" prompt.

That's weird... normally it's quite fast. What takes more time is finding a floppy drive (most of my machines don't have one permanently installed), connecting it, rebooting another time because you forgot to enable the floppy controller in the BIOS, so Linux won't see the drive... And then finding a floppy disk, trying to dd some bootable image on it, discovering the floppy is bad, finding another floppy... The update itself usually takes less time than all of that.

tgh · Post by **tgh** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 4:20 pm

'twas very odd. I'm still not sure whether it was because of the Asus A8V motherboard or if it was having issues talking to a brand new ATI video card. The boot diskette had been stripped of just about everything in the CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT files.

I discovered that it would eventually boot out of luck. After getting frustrated at trying a few different boot diskettes, I just left the box turned on and went and did something else for a few hours. Walked back in later, found that I finally had a command prompt.

(Sometimes I think it might've been quicker to drop a temporary hard drive in, install Windows and use the Win32 flash tool.)

Timbers2k · Post by **Timbers2k** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 4:01 pm

I have an Asus A8V and it the easyest board I've ever owned to upgrade the BIOS on. Just put the .bin file on a floppy or CD, put it in the drive and reboot, load the bios and tell it to upgrade. That's it, no OS needed at all.

tgh · Post by **tgh** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 5:39 pm

That's interesting... I have been stuck in the old mindset of "BIOS update? must find a boot disk...".

Now that I'm looking at the PDF user manual, I see the section 4.1.4 which talks about hitting [Alt-F2] during the boot.

nukem996 · Post by **nukem996** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:19 am

Still, I want a native Linux app that will just upgrade my BIOS then reboot my computer and im done. Many computers now(aka mine) dont have a floppy drive(infact companies like Dell, Gateway, and HP say that they are obsolete) so making a boot CD or finds a drive to temporarly connect to my computer is a realy pain in the ass.

widan · Post by **widan** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 12:32 pm

nukem996 wrote:Still, I want a native Linux app that will just upgrade my BIOS then reboot my computer and im done.

There is the /dev/bios project, but from the chipsets that are supported, I think it has not been maintained for a long time.

An additional problem of this approach : you need to flip some magic bits in the southbridge to enable address decoding for the flash chip and map it in the address space (the 0xF0000 window of the legacy systems is usually either shadow RAM or only part of the flash chip on modern systems - this window is 64K, but most BIOSes are at least twice that size) and to assert WE# (the "write allowed" signal) on the flash chip. Obviously how you do that depends on the chipset. And we don't have the needed documentation for most modern chipsets (it's next to impossible to get datasheets for most of them).

Some Dell systems seems to have a mechanism to update BIOS (see Documentation/dell_rbu.txt in the 2.6.14 kernel source). I think it works that way: the update program running on Linux allocates some physical memory and puts the new BIOS image there, then sets some flags in NVRAM telling the old BIOS that an update is waiting and where the new image is. Then you do a warm reboot (this kind of reboot keeps memory contents intact, so the new image is retained). The old BIOS then detects the flags in NVRAM, checks the new BIOS image integrity and does the flashing itself, then reboots again into the new BIOS. That way the Linux part doesn't have to handle the chipset/flash-specific things itself. But obviously the BIOS needs to handle this, so it would need support from the manufacturers...

nukem996 · Post by **nukem996** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 6:23 pm

Is there any reason that manufactures wouldnt release the information to flash the BIOS on their motherboards? It dosnt seem like its some big trade secert or something.

widan · Post by **widan** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 9:29 pm

The problem is not the board manufacturers (they have the documentation, but they signed NDAs to get it, so they can't provide it to other people), it's the chipset manufacturers. It is getting more and more difficult to get datasheets for modern chipsets if you are not a large company that will buy tons of chips. As to why they do that, I don't know.

It is possible to disassemble the "official" flashing tool to know what it does to enable the flash for a particular chipset. Once the flash is mapped and write-enabled, programming it is relatively simple (tedious as each flash manufacturer has its own method for erasing, ... but at least datasheets for the flash parts are available).

Remains the problem of testing the program... most people won't want to use it if there is the slightest risk of a failure that could render their system unbootable. It's not the same as trying the latest Linux kernel and finding out it doesn't work and crashes. A problem during a BIOS flash is usually difficult to recover from.

Timbers2k · Post by **Timbers2k** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 6:19 pm

nukem996 wrote:Still, I want a native Linux app that will just upgrade my BIOS then reboot my computer and im done. Many computers now(aka mine) dont have a floppy drive(infact companies like Dell, Gateway, and HP say that they are obsolete) so making a boot CD or finds a drive to temporarly connect to my computer is a realy pain in the ass.

At least with the A8V there is no app needed; no boot disk and really no floppy. All you need is the .bin bios file and some removable drive on your PC. I ended up using a R/W DVD because that was all I had at the time. You put the .bin file on the disk/DVD/CD/whatever and stick it in the drive, then just reboot and hit some keys, I think Alt+F2, and it loads the bios from the removable drive. All the routines are in the bios, so you don't need anything else. This completely does away with the need for any seperate flashing software.

widan · Post by **widan** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 7:50 pm

Timbers2k wrote:At least with the A8V there is no app needed; no boot disk and really no floppy. All you need is the .bin bios file and some removable drive on your PC.

This works with most recent Award BIOSes (I don't know for the AMI ones, maybe they have something similar). The BIOSes that can do that have the flash tool (awdflash.exe) integrated in the BIOS image itself. You still need a removable drive though. I wonder if a usb flash key would work...

uzz75 · Post by **uzz75** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 11:08 pm

Press ALT + F2 during POST on ASUS m/b for flash without any dos/windows boot floppy or other

nukem996 · Post by **nukem996** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 3:44 am

I just tried updating my BIOS via a flash drive and it just sits there saying "Please wait" :\ I guess I need to use a floppy drive still.

Timbers2k · Post by **Timbers2k** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 10:38 pm

nukem996 wrote:I just tried updating my BIOS via a flash drive and it just sits there saying "Please wait" :\ I guess I need to use a floppy drive still.

You can use a CD or DVD drive. It works fine.

marvin rouge · Post by **marvin rouge** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 10:43 am

Timbers2k wrote:At least with the A8V there is no app needed; no boot disk and really no floppy. All you need is the .bin bios file and some removable drive on your PC. I ended up using a R/W DVD because that was all I had at the time. You put the .bin file on the disk/DVD/CD/whatever and stick it in the drive, then just reboot and hit some keys, I think Alt+F2, and it loads the bios from the removable drive. All the routines are in the bios, so you don't need anything else. This completely does away with the need for any seperate flashing software.

oh, what's that .bin file ?
I just downloaded the latest (stable) bios for A8VDeluxe, it's a .zip file : A8V-ASUS-Deluxe-1015.zip
If I unzip it, I get this file : A8V-ASUS-Deluxe-1015.002 (and only this one)

Now, if I read the user manual, they tell us to rename the file into A8V.ROM (page 4-4 of the manual, "Using ASUS EZ Flash to update the BIOS").

So, did you mean .ROM file, or is there something else I should know ?

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Timbers2k · Post by **Timbers2k** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 2:25 pm

marvin rouge wrote:oh, what's that .bin file ?
I just downloaded the latest (stable) bios for A8VDeluxe, it's a .zip file : A8V-ASUS-Deluxe-1015.zip
If I unzip it, I get this file : A8V-ASUS-Deluxe-1015.002 (and only this one)

Now, if I read the user manual, they tell us to rename the file into A8V.ROM (page 4-4 of the manual, "Using ASUS EZ Flash to update the BIOS").

So, did you mean .ROM file, or is there something else I should know ?

No, I followed the directions in the manual. Sorry the .bin was the firmware for my router. Just rename the file from Asus to A8V.ROM and put it on a CD.

marvin rouge · Post by **marvin rouge** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:35 pm

Timbers2k wrote:No, I followed the directions in the manual. Sorry the .bin was the firmware for my router. Just rename the file from Asus to A8V.ROM and put it on a CD.

Oh. Thanks.
Let's flash the BIOS.

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taurus · Post by **taurus** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:52 pm

marvin rouge wrote:
Timbers2k wrote:No, I followed the directions in the manual. Sorry the .bin was the firmware for my router. Just rename the file from Asus to A8V.ROM and put it on a CD.
Oh. Thanks.
Let's flash the BIOS.

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Let's just hope the power won't go out while you are doing that; otherwise, you will have a dead motherboard!!!

marvin rouge · Post by **marvin rouge** » Thu Dec 01, 2005 2:26 pm

taurus wrote:Let's just hope the power won't go out while you are doing that; otherwise, you will have a dead motherboard!!!

Done ! No power problem, motherboard still alive

I just burned A8V.ROM to a CD, reboot, ALT+F2, flash.
Just after, there is a probleme (cmos cheksum), so you just have to reconfigure the BIOS (boot hard drive, ...).

Big advantage of the new bios (1015): down limit of the cpu fan speed has been reduced to 1200RPM, meaning that with large fan (I have a 120mm heatsink from thermalright here) you don't have anymore boot error due to low fan speed. Cool.

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nukem996 · Post by **nukem996** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:53 am

taurus wrote:Let's just hope the power won't go out while you are doing that; otherwise, you will have a dead motherboard!!!

ASUS has the BIOS stored in two places so if the power does go out then it will just revert to the old one. If both get wiped out then you can pop in the CD that came with the motherboard and it will flash a default one on. At least thats what I read on the ASUS site