I have moded an Award BIOS for a friend's Gigabyte GA-73pvm-S2 motherboard using the tools I found here. I need to know two things before flashing it for him: 1. How can I test it before flashing it to make sure it is a good BIOS and won't brick his motherboard? 2. In case it went wrong, how can I recover the motherboard to its original state? I know there is a great thread for BIOS recovery already; but I would like a more specific information about recovering this type of motherboard. Thanks
You are asking the obvious... 1. No you can't 2. Read up the Recovery procedure, for detailed instructions for recovering your type of motherboard, read up on the documentation provided by your motherboard manufacturer (You can't expect us to read this up for you, can you?)
First, most Gigabyte Award BIOS files need to be done with the SSV3 method. As long as the mod finished successfully with NO errors then it should be as safe as it will ever be. To test it: Open the modified BIOS with the Award SLIC Tool and it should tell you that SLIC 2.1 has been added using SSv3 method. That is easiest way I know without actually flashing it. Also make sure you flash from DOS using Flashspi that came with the BIOS from Gigabyte. That is the safest and has proven to be the most successful method to flash a Gigabyte Award BIOS. I don't own a Gigabyte board so I can't comment on recovery methods other than read the recovery thread again.
Thanks for your replies. I flashed it and it worked. That was my first attempt at BIOS moding, so I was a bit nervous, especially since it was for somebody else's motherboard. And you were right. It did have a dual BIOS, which made it easier to take the risk.
hi guys i have a question and would greatly appreciate if you could help me out , i downloaded latest bios for an asus extreme II formula and used awardtool to incoprate vista slic 2.0 for asus including cert using pubkey method i then used it again to incorporate asus slic 2.1 with a 2.1 cert with pubkey method again , will this bios allow me to dual boot vista and windows 7 and have them both activate offline if i build the os discs with both required certs in the correspoding $oem$ folder and use the slp keys , as i downloaded the asus bios mod for that motherboard off here (it used pubkey method also) for win7 and put it in mates pc and installed windows 7 in his spare drive and it activated fine but dwm.exe encountered error 0xc000007b and then he went back to his vista (which he had soft modded using activator crap) then it said he wasnt activated anymore so i tried importing the cert from win7 into vista and it wouldnt accept an oem slp key to activate at all (but im guessing its cos of his bios emulator)