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First post, by tegrady

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How do you know which version of Award Flash to use when flashing your bios?

I have an Asus P55T2P4 that needs to be flashed. I have the latest bios, but I cannot find instructions on which version of Award Flash to use.

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by tegrady on 2018-06-02, 03:18. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 5, by RJDog

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You should check out UniFlash

http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash

It supposedly has better success rate for most older-ish boards. I have used it on my AMI BIOS board.

Reply 2 of 5, by dionb

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RJDog wrote:

You should check out UniFlash

http://www.rainbow-software.org/uniflash

It supposedly has better success rate for most older-ish boards. I have used it on my AMI BIOS board.

YMMV with later boards; particularly Asus did some odd stuff in how BIOS gets written >1998 - simply could not get it to work correctly last week on a P5A. But I strongly recall having had no problems with Uniflash 1.40 and P55T2P4. To be on the safe side, you can flash to a diferent EEPROM (if you have a spare) so you can easily swap back if something goes wrong.

In any event AMI vs Award (or Phoenix or whatever) isn't relevant with Uniflash. It needs to support the (motherboard) chipset and the EEPROM you are using, but doens't care a bit about the actual content of the firmware you are flashing onto the EEPROM. That is both the huge advantage and significant risk of Uniflash. I love it and basically never use anything else - but I have ample ways to flash EEPROMs and so recover misflashes (like continuously happened on that P5A - eventually I just hot-flashed the chip on my Tyan Tsunami). If you're not confient you can recover from a misflash, either by using a dedicated EEPROM flasher, hot-flashing on another known-good motherboard or using the proprietary bootblock-recovery on the board itself, Uniflash might not be the best choice and you have to mess around with aflash versions...

Reply 3 of 5, by tegrady

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OK, so I am trying to use various versions of Award Flash and also Pflash.exe (as this is what the motherboard manual tells me to use).

When I try to flash with Pflash.exe, I get this error "Boot Block of New BIOS is different from old one!!!" and then next line says "Please Use 'advanced feature' to flash whole bios!!!"

Should I use the 'advanced feature' and flash the whole bios?

Also, when I try to use Awdflash, it either does nothing (no error messages, just stops responding), or it just tells me "Checksum: 8E70H" and then stops responding.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks.

Reply 4 of 5, by tegrady

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I was able to flash the bios successfully. However, I found out that my revision of the motherboard only supports up to a non-MMX 200Mhz Pentium. Darn it! I was hoping to upgrade to a MMX 233. Oh well, I'll just upgrade to the vanilla 200mhz and then go onto the next project.

Reply 5 of 5, by meljor

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Use a good cooler and the mmx cpu will work at the 3,3v setting just fine.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1