aureal wrote on 2022-04-10, 02:55:

hey guys […]
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hey guys

I have a NF7s v2 that sadly doesnt post.. and gives a black screen. I have tried all the discharging tricks, different psus, ram sticks, video cards and different slots of the last two and narrowed it down to it possibly being a corrupted bios. It gives the correct beeps when there is no gpu or memory installed so i think it is getting pretty far into the post until its handing over to the bios. The caps look good with no bulges so I wanna try this first before getting the soldering iron out since Im reading that bios corruption is pretty common on nforce2 boards. First I have some questions if you know the answer to:

1. Has anyone fixed their abit board with a different pheonix bios chip before? Im seeing an old old post on a miscellanous forum that abit might have write protected the bios chip.
2. Are there usb dongles I can put my corupted bios chip in to write to it on a modern computer so i dont have to find another nf7s v2 board thats working
3. Can I get the phoenix bios chip from any nforce2 board, swap it to my board, boot it up and rewrite the correct firmware to it?

Attached is a pic of the bios it has.

Do you get any sign of life from the floppy drive, as if you do you may still be able to attempt a 'blind' bootblock recovery flash - something like this https://web.archive.org/web/20150416085038/ht … /bootblock.html

aureal wrote on 2022-04-10, 02:55:

hey guys […]
Show full quote

hey guys

I have a NF7s v2 that sadly doesnt post.. and gives a black screen. I have tried all the discharging tricks, different psus, ram sticks, video cards and different slots of the last two and narrowed it down to it possibly being a corrupted bios. It gives the correct beeps when there is no gpu or memory installed so i think it is getting pretty far into the post until its handing over to the bios. The caps look good with no bulges so I wanna try this first before getting the soldering iron out since Im reading that bios corruption is pretty common on nforce2 boards. First I have some questions if you know the answer to:

1. Has anyone fixed their abit board with a different pheonix bios chip before? Im seeing an old old post on a miscellanous forum that abit might have write protected the bios chip.
2. Are there usb dongles I can put my corupted bios chip in to write to it on a modern computer so i dont have to find another nf7s v2 board thats working
3. Can I get the phoenix bios chip from any nforce2 board, swap it to my board, boot it up and rewrite the correct firmware to it?

Attached is a pic of the bios it has.

I have revived some boards with a corrupted BIOS that people dumped as "broken". It happens. I don't remember if they were Abit, I don't think so.

You can either flash that same chip, provided you confirm it's not physically damaged (you can read or write without problems) or buy a new one and flash it.

I prefer to use an external flasher like the TL866II or any other you could get your hands on. It's nice, clean, hassle free. Last resort is using another motherboard with the same BIOS socket and once you boot, remove the BIOS, put your empty chip, and flash it. You need to boot using a floppy and use uniflash. Not the friendliest route and not always compatible.

Go on and flash it with the latest BIOS and see if it comes back to life!

Any visible signs of caps failure?

I'm currently dealing with a similar corrupted bios situation. PC boots into bootblock mode but when I load up the flash utility it cannot recognize the flash chip. From what I've been able to gather it very well may be that the chip has write protection written into one of the memory addresses on the chip. Therefore, no jumper settings or cmos clear will fix it. Either that or the chip is too damaged to be recognized. I've got an eprom programmer on the way.

hey guys, I havent given up trying to fix my nf7s but I've hit a roadblock. I'm trying the automatic bios reflash method with a 3.5" system disk but Ive been unable to obtain the bios file. The latest bios on the abit website is version 27 (nf7d27.exe) http://abit.ws/page/en/download/download_bios … T_TYPE=Socket+A but its contained inside a exe and when I run it inside real msdos on a pentium 3 machine to extract the files I get the error "undefined error" which doesnt really tell me anything and Ive been unable to manually extract it inside windows using 7zip. Would anyone be able to upload the extracted bios for me please. I grabbed award bios flasher: awdflash823E.exe off a random site but i'm not sure if thats the best version to use.

I think I figured out what the problem is. The bios file on the abit website (all download links on that page) is CORRUPTED and only 97bytes. While I found the bios file on a 3rd party site and it's 267kb and correctly extracts in 7zip with all the correct files inside. I'll try running the boot disk tmrw morning

The bios files from the abit website are almost all defective/corrupt.
Stuff that works can be found at
https://www.ultimateretro.net
If you are into overclocking
https://www.biosbude.de
Hosted by a guy named Tzk. His latest achievement was 270-MHz FSB Prime95 stable on an Asus A7N8X
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads … 584473/page-249
feel free to hang out with us (we speak english as well)

Hello, I can say the BIOSes found on the archived Abit website are working, at least for the NF7-s 2.0.
Once you find the BIOS file you want, note the name of the file and to download it use this link as an example, modify it according to the file you want. For example, this is the link for the latest BIOS:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060326210519/ht … _2.0/nf7d27.exe

The Sandman wrote on 2022-04-23, 12:49:

The bios files from the abit website are almost all defective/corrupt.

I tried the BIOS from https://ultimateretro.net and the BIOS from the archived Abit website I linked, and both have the same md5 checksum. That is to say, the files are identical (no corruption). Maybe you had a problem when you uncompressed the files? Or maybe both files are corrupt?

I have this motherboard and was trying it recently. It's tricky. It has a bug of some sort. I thought it was the BIOS but I'm not sure that it was.
The caps looks fine and top-quality.

I tried many BIOS and all show this behavior.

You can enter the BIOS, but it hangs. You need to enter and exit the BIOS pretty quickly, and then just use it. I didn't do extensive testing.

I observed a similar behavior on a A7V8X-MX SE I have. You try to enter the BIOS and it hangs.

I managed to enter the BIOS on the NF7-s 2.0 and modify the options with a Duron 1.4 CPU.

Then I managed to get it booting with an Athlon XP 2600+ AXDA2600DKV4D and an Athlon XP 2800+ AXDA2800DKV4D.