How can I flash the BIOS without DOS?

[xanatose]

I have a computer with a Dual P3 1000 CUV4X-D with an Award Medallion BIOS 6.0. That seems to have a corrupted BIOS. The keyboard works during the memory check, but stops working after that (So its imposible to access the BIOS). After that Windows and Linux will find the keyboard and everything works. But this is only after the options are set. So I cannot choose diferent kernels on Grub and cannot choose anything on Windows before it boots.

The problem I have is that altough Linux and Windows take over the keyboard and can work with it. DOS cannot do it (since it relies on the BIOS) and the flashing utility is DOS only.

I have tried with both a PS/2 and a USB keyboard and the outcome is the same. I even tried to make a boot CD pass the arguments to the program and let it flash the BIOS without intervention. Unfortunately it did not work since It expects a user input before flashing the bios.

So I wonder if:

- There is a way to flash an Award Medallion 6.0 BIOS without using DOS
or There is a way to reset the DOS keyboard during boot time so that it works.
or Ther is a USB driver for keyboard for DOS that works WITHOUT himem.sys or EMMS.

I tried the ASUS forum without luck. So altough this is not an assembly topic, I tough and I might just try to find an answer here (Besides buying a new BIOS or throwing the machine to the garbage  :P).

[arafel]

Try creating a bootable floppy and put "awdflash.exe bios.bin saved.bin /py /sy /cc /cp /cd /sb /r" inside the autoexec.bat.
This should make the flashing process automatic without any user interaction.

[Mark Jones]

I'm not 100% positive, but it sounds hosed. The problem IS with the BIOS, so no bootable device is going to be active to boot from, sorry. :(

If it were my PC, I'd try to find the specs of the actual BIOS chip itself - maybe it can be reprogrammed outside of the PC altogether. Normally anymore BIOS chips come in a PLCC or similar package (fits into a socket) so they are physically removable. Wether or not they are reprogrammable outside of the PC depends totally on the internal topography of the chip. The BIOS code itself resides in a .BIN file on your bootable media, which shouldn't need any special conversion to pipe out a good PC's parallel port and into "a flashable chip." With the correct hardware interface (and assuming the bios chip itself has some kind of known programming method), I see no reason why it can't be reprogrammed this way. I do this all the time with PIC microcontrollers. But granted, this is a little outside most computer user's capability.

If you can get an engineering datasheet for that exact BIOS chip, you'd be halfway there.

[MichaelW]

You could try restoring the default setup by clearing the CMOS (RTC) RAM. I have seen cases where this method was able to clear problem settings that were not visible in or controllable from the BIOS setup. You could do this by removing the battery and waiting a while, but it would be quicker and easier to use the pair of solder points (directly in front of the VT82C686B Southbridge) that were provided for this purpose.

To erase the RTC RAM: (1) unplug the computer, (2) short the solder points, (3) turn ON the computer, (4) hold down the <Del> key during the boot process and enter BIOS setup to re-enter data.

[hutch--]

A daual 1 gig PIII processor board should work reasonably well if there is nothing wrong with it and one thing I would look for is if the board has a jumper to reset the BIOS to its defaults. If you can get aything displayed as it boots up, make sure you get exactly the right BIOS patch by identifying it from the bot sequence and use the recommended boot disk to run it. Michael has a good point here that by setting the BIOS to its defaults you often clear up problems that are not displayed in the settings.

[xanatose]

Removing the BIOS battery and waiting solved the keyboard problem. And I was able to flash the BIOS upgrade.

Luckyly the problem was a glitch with the CMOS and not the BIOS. Thanks MichaelW for the information.

And thanks everyone for the help.