botched bios upgrade

[Batman]

I was flashing my gateway solo 9500 with a update when 1/2 way thru the update the update froze. I had no choice but to cut power. well now all it does is turn on and look for a floppy.

is there a crisis recovery disk i can use to put a new flash in the computer? it has a phoenix notebios in it.

i went to gateway and phoenix and could not locate a recovery disk.

I assume gateway has one and will only hand it out to owners still under warranty, considering this is a 2001 model laptop it's no longer covered.

anyone here able to help?

[kf4sqb]

Unless it will boot from the floppy drive, a recovery disk won't help you. Try to boot it with anything, like a DOS boot disk. If it tries to boot, you may get lucky and be able to recover it. If it won't, you're SOL. About your only hope at that point is if the BIOS's FlashROM is socketed, which I seriously doubt. If it is socketed, you may be able to pull it and dump the BIOS image file into it with a PROM burner. Sadly, all the MoBo's I've seen lately have surface mount FlashROMs.

BTW, were you trying to use a bootable flash upgrade, or was it Windows-based?

[wavetar]

BIOS upgrade failures are tricky. I assume you booted from a BIOS flash floppy to do the upgrade? If it won't boot from it again, you're pretty much s.o.l. without getting into chip swapping & such.

This thread may help you:

http://ask-leo.com/c000497.html

And of course some reading on one of the premier BIOS websites on the internet couldn't hurt:

http://www.wimsbios.com/index.jsp

Good luck,

Todd

[Batman]

thats what i was afraid of fortunately i'm eyeing a cheap replacement mobo on ebay it's a PITA to replace laptop mobos.