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General discussionMessed up creating a dual-boot machine. Help appreciated.(18 posts)(18 posts)
(18 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 01, 2015
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timppu: How it works is that the BIOS has two banks, active and backup. As the name suggests, the active bank is the one running. When you perform the BIOS update, it is actually the inactive backup bank that is being updated. Only if that backup bank update was successful and the checksum matches, that bank is made active (and the bank which was earlier active becomes the backup bank).
I don't think it goes that way. The active BIOS bank is the one which is programmable be a user and needs power to maintain data within. If you flash bios - you programm this user-updatable bank. If you misflash it - you have to take out battery (and/or dabble with jumpers) and after restart bios from backup non-programmable bank is written to a user-programmable bank.

Back in the days you COULD brick your PC with misflashing bios (my friend did so by trying to have custom logo which appeared to be to big and overwrote bios data :-). But starting from at least 2000 - motherboards usually are equipped with backup banks and I don't think you can easily brick a PC during update process...
Post edited October 01, 2015 by tburger
Posted October 01, 2015
Your BIOS is probably foobar. So probably you need to change the motherboard as most don't have dual bios.
As advice for next time: NEVER EVER SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER WHILE FLASHING FIRMWARE (BIOS, VIDEO BIOS etc).
The above applies for other devices too (phones, tablets, TVs etc.)
Post edited October 01, 2015 by blotunga
Posted October 01, 2015
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HereForTheBeer: For general updating, I've had good results on a few different machines using SlimDrivers.
I will have to check that out sometime. I've not used it before.

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Smannesman: I first encountered those updates with Dell, although these days many vendors supply them.
It might be because you used to have to boot with a special update disk to flash the BIOS, but these days the installer can be run from Windows.
And yes it is totally possible to flash an older version, it would depend on the installer of course whether or not it would allow you to. But I think they commonly just warn you and don't prevent you from flashing the incorrect version.
Yeah my gaming rig can be done straight from windows, I've always done it the old fashion way though. I never knew it was possible to actually downgrade a BIOS though (I've never tried). But I like keeping things up to date, even if it's dated 7 years ago. lol
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionMessed up creating a dual-boot machine. Help appreciated.(18 posts)(18 posts)
(18 posts)