Re: BIOS boot problem

On Tue, 8/4/2026 4:10 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:06:54 -0300, Shadow <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:12:56 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
>>
>>> I think my old 2008 homebuilt Abit pc is finally coming to the end of
>>> its journey. It has started hanging on the boot at the truck picture
>>> logo (where you have the option of Delete-ing into the BIOS). I could
>>> press Enter or Tab a few times and it would stagger on, get to my BCD
>>> menu and then boot successfully any OS I wanted.
>>>
>>> I replaced the CMOS battery and all was well -  for a day, next AM it
>>> hung again, first boot of the day. The  old battery measured 3.2v
>>> after I removed it. The new one had measured 3.3v before I put it in. 
>>>
>>> I don't think I cleared the BIOS, just stuck the new battery in.
>>>
>>> Anyone, (Paul?) have any ideas how to save my precious old sweetheart?
>>
>> 	Dunno if BIOS software can suffer from Bit Rot. If it can,
>> maybe, just maybe re-flashing with a good image could correct it.
>> 	Paul probably knows...
>> 	[]'s
> Re-flashing sounds like a resonable last-ditch effort. In my log, on
> 9-22-08, looks like I flashed my AWD BIOS up to version 11. I'd
> downloaded it to a 3.5 floppy. Amazingly I located that 18 year old
> floppy! It's readable in Explorer, but wouldn't trust it very far.
> Might try copying it to a new diskette, dunno if that would prove
> anything, Says I'm supposed to flash from msdos, boot a dos diskette.
> Abit's long out of business, no hope of downloading that bin file
> again from anywhere.
> 
> I guess I could jumper that shorting block, that's supposed to set
> BIOS back to what the factory sent me. 
> 
> And then again... for the past few days it has been booting without
> that hang, so desperation measures on hold. But this type shit never
> goes away it just haunts in the background.
> 

There are a couple possible sources.

Archive.org may have a copy of the Abit web site.

The other possibility, is at the time, someone privately may
have made a snapshot of the site. So many years have passed,
it's unlikely the private source is still online.

To flash, there is a version indicator inside the file. The
flasher software typically checks that it is going into
the correct motherboard. The main BIOS image has a checksum,
which only checks that the image has integrity. If the
floppy copy had a bad byte or two, the motherboard would
no longer POST, but would be using the emergency boot block.

Typically you could flash the same version, or a more
recent version. Not all flash utilities would support going
backwards, and a backward version operation required one
extra command line parameter to be set.

The emergency boot block has no graphics, so it is a pig
to work with. If a BIOS flash halts for any reason, in the
middle of the flash, many BIOS compositions *update*
the emergency boot block [you're not supposed to do that!]
but when the tools used to make the BIOS change, they
have to push out both a new main BIOS block as well as
a new emergency boot block. The very purpose of the
emergency boot block is to make it impossible to brick
the computer. But as so many motherboard designs have
replaced both flash blocks at the same time, the bullet-proof-ness
of the approach just isn't there, and most of the time,
a botched BIOS flash is a brickage. I've done lots of flashes
here, without bricking anything, but then, the flasher
designs have improved over the years as well (the block
flasher code is actually a routine in the existing BIOS -- the
BIOS is copied to low RAM so that's how you can flash
a BIOS without an issue).

As a betting individual, I don't think this has a
high probability of doing anything one way or another.

I think your problem is the aging of some voltage regulator
design, something slightly out of spec. I've had two boards
ruined that way. If the board is extremely dirty, if
you're a smoker and the board is coated in tar plus
dust, that's a pretty good test of a design to external
challenges. I don't smoke, and yet I've had two boards fail.
Someone I've worked with continuously for a while, he is a
pipe smoker, and yet his stuff still works. So we cannot
conclude that smoking is a death sentence for electronics,
but it does affect cooling fans and heatsink surfaces
(stuff will run a bit warmer).

One Asus design, someone used an IR imager on the board,
and they discovered a small eight pin chip running at 100C
(boiling point of water). This does not guarantee the chip
will die instantly, but this is also not a good thing.
Just adhering a small RAMsink to one of those, is enough
to solve the problem . Nothing in the documentation hints
at the existence of a hotspot.

   Paul