A Noobie in some ways, not in others. Hello and a few questions!

I used to code in 6502, MC68000 so this kind of thing is right up my street, been looking for another place to exercise my assembler language/machine code skills..... these bloody machines are so fast people use these lame high level languages(I always find THEM tough to understand!) but BIOS's, only a measley(lol) meg to play with.


BTW, been reading this forum a lot and something suprises me, I just flashed the BIOS using QFlash(!).... sorry MS-DOS does not exist nowadays, what we have is a CLI enviroment inside Vista- sure I've made bootable flash drives with win98 origins but unless you boot the flash drive before Vista/XP boots it's just a CLI in Vista and these tend to be as risky as doing anything in Vista IMO.... you probably know that but so many people believe that Vista has a 'Dos' mode, and they will flash in these as an alternative to using the Windows interface(which messes up so often mainly becuase of 'from the toilet' coding). To me QFlash is a native program, stored in ROM so no worries of corruption, I always use a USB flash card so little there. To me over all the boards using the onboard flash utility have never let me down, not even a dodgy disk! If I am talking utter chit someone please tell me but tell me why on this issue, I have a P5N32-SLI-E ready for RMA(don't think they'll touch it as a few CPU pins in the socket are bent) and just got a DFI P45 back(that'll be next if this works out) real feked up memory simm(gotta send those off to OCZ to....) I have my share of accidents as I am around, inside and on-top PC's alot but touch wood I have never bricked a board from BIOS flashing.... though I thought I had a few times and it's a HORRIBLE feeling.

For those that can solder, have surface mount tools and technique, they sell BIOS chips on a certain large marketing site for £5-£10 with2/3 day delivery for most major boards, better than a 4 week wait(the DFI took 6 weeks before I got a new one, the Asus, I dread to think... long, long, long time). If your REAL good or have one of those solder presses I can put a few beer tokens your way for services rendered to my Asus P5N32E-SLI

Back to my mobo, I think everything went well, .I flashed the F9 BIOS as I have a nice overclock on this exact BIOS and it still works fine(of course I went to default at the time). I had been using VistaLoader2 on Vista 32 Ultimate Edition. I think I should have deleted the old Vista off as when using a utility it said I only has 28days left, I just wanted to keep my program; academic now as very soon I will be going Vista64/Windows7 64(RTM build 7600) so much of them will have issues.

So I used Voaktools(sp.) to attempt to rid my machine of all loaders and whatever else I had so as to purge Vista of it's Dellness and all other remnants of Windows. Now hears the funny thing, the whole thing went perfect. After repeated attempts at getting rid of all cracks(the Loader) with both Voaktools and manually, then using the same tool to put odd values in my OEM certifaction and whatever else I was going to make good again with Asus info, several reboots, I SLMGR.VBS'd my Asus certificate and my ultimate number.

It seems ok, I just did a load of updates(pointless.... as the 64 thing is hours away... but I could do with the practise with any weird issues involving errors from this 'Hard' patching) and so far it just says that Windows is Activated. I have no clue to finding out if I've been succesfull. What I do know is that Dell logo are still there and certain lines of info have been xxxx'd out like phone number, etc. I have not done much but am yet to see any mention of Asus except in the binary images of the Bios and when I put the certificate in a Hex editor. Well, everything seems to be where it has to be, so I'm hoping. If anyone knows a sure fire sign it is/isn't working(within the next 28 days!) I would love to know.

 

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