Several Ways to Flash Your BIOS on Asus Motherboards !

Clunk · #1 30-09-2007, 18:41

Right, this gets asked a lot, and there are several ways of doing this, that a lot of people seem to be unaware of.

The easiest method (in my opinion) is this one;

Method one.

Grab a USB stick and plug it into your PC.

Download the latest bios for your motherboard and unzip the .ROM file to the root of your USB stick.

Restart your PC, enter the BIOS, got to TOOLS-EZ-Flash, and if it is all working ok, you should see the contents of your USB stick listed.

(You can also do a backup of your original BIOS settings here, which will save you re-entering them all later )

Select the .ROM file, then follow the on screen instructions.

When it has finished, it will ask you to restart your PC.

At this point, it is a good idea (not essential), to power off completely and clear the CMOS, then power back up and re-enter all of your timings, voltages etc. (you only really need to do this step if you were having major problems before the BIOS flash.)

Method two.

Same as above, only instead of putting the .ROM file on a USB stick, simply put it in the root of a FAT32 formatted drive.

I'm not entirely sure why, but some drives won't show up in EZ-Flash for me at all, no matter what I do, so if this happens to you, and you haven't got a USB stick, or another hard drive to try, read on....

Method three.

Same as the first method, but using a floppy drive instead of a USB stick.

Note: Some of the newer Asus motherboards use BIOS files that are 2MB in size, and if this is the case, you can't use this method unfortunately

Method four.

Another one that uses a floppy drive, so the same exclusions apply as method three.

Full details of this method can be found here. Personally, I don't think there is much point to this method if you have a motherboard that has EZ-Flash built in.

Method five.

Exactly the same as Method four, but with a bootable USB stick.

Method six.

This is the same as method one, but instead of getting into the BIOS, we go straight to EZ-Flash by pressing ALT+F12 at post.

This method can also be used with a hard drive, or a floppy drive as well.

Method seven.

Asus Update! - This is an online/Windows BIOS flashing tool, and my advice is to stay well away from this.

The number of people that try and use Asus Update and end up with a dead motherboard is incredible, and if you get a really picky retailer, they will tell you that this isn't covered under warranty, and that you need to RMA to Asus, which can take weeks - So don't use Asus Update!

Method eight.

Crash Free Bios - This can be a motherboard lifesaver. If you have flashed your BIOS, and it has gone wrong, simply grab your Asus CD, put it in your CD/DVD drive and switch on the PC.

The PC will restore its own BIOS to the original shipping BIOS if all goes well, and prompt you to restart, but there are certain things that can stop this.

Lets say that you bought the latest CPU and put it in an older motherboard, but that motherboard needed a BIOS flash before it would see that new CPU, then this isn't going to work, unless you do the recovery with an older CPU that the shipping BIOS supports.

Other hardware issues can also hinder the recovery, and in that case, you will have to try other hardware, or endure an RMA

I'm sure there are a few variations that I've missed, but if you use method one, you should be fine

I'll add some pics later

supershanks · #2 30-09-2007, 19:03

To use your HD you need a FAT partition. Dos won't read a partition formatted in NTFS. A 1~2Gb partition will be fine for a few bios files & bckups of your favourite settings.

Clunk · #3 30-09-2007, 19:05

You mean for the afudos thing? You can use your NTFS HD with EZ-Flash though...I will double check that later when I do the piccies

supershanks · #4 30-09-2007, 23:40

No not the afudos thing, ez flash , like a floppy flash is using a dos enviroment so can't see a NTFS partition. Try mapping your HD partitions from within EZ Flash you'll only see Fat/Fat32 partitions

Grimpy · #5 20-10-2007, 22:49

Ive tried updating my bios tonight using a usb drive but its not seeing it in the ez flash utility,any ideas?

supershanks · #6 20-10-2007, 23:31

How's your usb drive formatted Fat or ntfs??

Grimpy · #7 20-10-2007, 23:47

Fat,just dug my old floppy drive out but cant use that as the bios file is to big to go on a floppy.

Grimpy · #8 21-10-2007, 00:16

Sorted now,used the usb stick which was for readyboost and it picked it up straight away and flashed fine.

supershanks · #9 21-10-2007, 00:18

if your usb drive is fat formatted, ez flash should see it. If your using front case usb socket are you sure their working ??

cue · #10 08-02-2008, 02:36

Hi Everybody, This is one of the problems, I have an asus motherboard p5gd1-fm (fujitsu-siemens real manufacturer) everything is new, i put all parts together, this motherboard uses the EZ flash utility to flash, is recomended to download the bios and save it in a 1.44 mb floppy disk, one of the problems is that the file is bigger than the capacity of the floppy dsk. I downloaded the file anyway to my c drive and then compressed it to save it in the floppy disk and I renamed it p5gd1fm.rom just like says the manual. After that I putted the floppy disk in the comp. and it display something like this...

EZ flash starting bios update......
Checking for floppy......
Floppy found !
Reading file "P5GD1FM.ROM". Completed.
Failed to flash !

At this point I really dont know what else to do I have done evething I have could, I was thinking that this error could be because I compress the original file, If anybody know any way to flash this chip or how can I put this file in a floppy disk without afect the original file please help me...Now I'm stock. And sorry by my English.