Brian K said:
Motherboard: Mach Speed K8M8MSR2
Operating: Windows XP Home Edition SP2
BIOS Award
I am trying to flash my Bios with an update. I keep getting this
message:
Flash ROM is Write Protected. Make sure lockout jumpers are set
correctly or not.
In my motherboard manual there is only one set of jumpers JBAT that
is CMOS Clear jumper. I find no reference to a set of lockout
jumpers. If you have the same or another Mach Speed board could you
tell me what they are talking about?
I took a look at the user manual for your board, and in
the Specification section, it says the BIOS chip is "2MB"
(what they mean is 2 megabits, or 256KByte).
When I go to the Jetway FTP site, all the files listed
in the K8M8MS folder are 512KB.
Trying to program too big a file into too small a device,
is bound to cause indigestion for the software flasher
program. I would be very, very careful, or you could
end up with a dead board.
The K8MR2A03.bin file does appear to be an Award file.
The string at the very end of the file is "6A7L1J19"
and that had better match something shown on the display
when the computer boots, or else this file is not for
that machine. (On Asus motherboards, that string would
normally be the name of the motherboard, like A8N-SLI
or the like.)
With a hex editor, you can search for -lh5- in the file,
and the string right after each occurrence of that string,
is the name of a BIOS module.
K8MR2A03.BIN
awardext.rom
CPUCODE.BIN <--- usually microcode patches for CPU
ACPITBL.BIN
awardeyt.rom
EN_CODE.BIN <--- English language for screen
K8M1623_41.ROM
K8N1651.ROM
6420R490.rom <--- VIA RAID module ? Might work for an 8237.
8233LAN.BIN <--- ethernet BIOS for a Southbridge ethernet?
(DMI, ESCD, Award BootBlock BIOS are down at the end )
So, it could be for a K8M800 based board, but I don't
like the size.
Some flash chips do have lockable segments, and it could
be that Jetway locked the "Boot Block", which is stored
in the last 8KByte of the image. The locking feature is
a trivial lock, and is intended to prevent programming
accidents - it is not a security feature as such. I have
a sample flash chip datasheet, and short write sequences
turn off the lock.
The options for the flash command in the manual, I think
they would have caused the boot block to be programmed,
so the program trying to do that would be legitimate. So,
it could all be OK, and for some reason Jetway set the
lock bit at the factory, and the flashing program is
not set up to write over a locked segment.
You should be able to get the options for Awdflash by
using \? as the only argument on the command line. From
an old posting, these should be some of the options:
"Voila les parametres acceptables pour AWDFLASH:
Awdflash 7.97D (C)Award Software 2001 All Rights Reserved
Usage: AWDFLASH [FileName1] [FileName2] [/<sw>[/<sw>...]]
FileName1 : New BIOS Name For Flash Programming
FileName2 : BIOS File For Backing-up the Original BIOS
<Swtches> ?: Show Help Messages
py: Program Flash Memory pn: No Flash Programming
sy: Backup Original BIOS To Disk File sn: No Original BIOS Backup
Sb: Skip BootBlock programming Wb: Always Programming
BootBlock cd: Clear DMI Data After Programming sd: Save DMI data
to file cp: Clear PnP(ESCD) Data After Programming
cc: Clear CMOS Data After Programming
LD: Destroy CMOS Checksum And No System Halt For First Reboot
After Programming Tiny: Occupy lesser memory
QI: Qualify flash part number with source file
E: Return to DOS When Programming is done
R: RESET System After Programming
F: Use Flash Routines in Original BIOS For Flash Programming
cks: Show update Binfile checksum
cksXXXX: Compare Binfile CheckSum with XXXX
Example: AWDFLASH 6A69R000.bin /py/sn/cd/cp/cks1A26 "
One thing you could try, is backing up the old BIOS first.
Something like:
awdflash K8MR2A03.BIN old.bin /pn/sy
and that should copy the current BIOS into old.bin .
The only reason for putting the name of the new file in
the command, is the program may be expecting to see two
file name strings in the command format.
If you want to ask Jetway about this, there is a web mail
page. Go to their FAQ page, and click the Tech Support
Online button on the left of the page. You fill out the
form and ask your question there. Otherwise, you can email:
(e-mail address removed) (replace something with technic)
and ask some questions there.
If the flash goes bad, you can always get another BIOS
chip, preprogrammed, from badflash.com . But the tricky
part, will be providing them with a BIOS file that you
know is good for that motherboard.
I'd say so far, you are pretty lucky to still have a
working motherboard. Have you rebooted recently ?
That is when you'd get the bad news.
HTH,
Paul
