I flashed this board with a F5 SLIC BIOS (which I'm pretty sure I got from here, although it has an HP certificate and I haven't been able to find the same one with a search) a few years ago. I want to do my friend's board now, so was checking the procedure and decided to try the F6 SLIC BIOS I now have. I flashed using Flashspi.exe (v1.32) and after I was able to boot Win7 as normal, but then it started behaving strangely. I rebooted and flashed again, this time using /C /E to clear the CMOS and DMI data. This seemed to work, as after rebooting the BIOS settings were reset to default. However, after adjusting the settings back to how they were before, I could no longer boot, with just a "NO GRLDR" error (I use grub4dos). I tried setting each of my HDDs to first in the BIOS but with the other one I just get an error about Invalid Boot Disk, so obviously the other one is correct as it's got the grub4dos MBR on it, it just can't find the glrdr on the HDD. I decided to flash F5 SLIC BIOS back, using /C again to clear the CMOS data, but not the DMI data. This didn't reset the BIOS settings and they were as I'd set them before. I still am unable to boot though. I've tried it on AHCI (which is what I was using before) and IDE but it's still the same, so I can only guess somehow the HDD has got corrupted Could someone advise the exact correct switches I should use to flash please? Once I'm sure I've done that right, I'll have to boot from my USB stick into a PE and check/repair the HDDs.
Thanks. I see you haven't used any switches, so I presume they're not needed? I think it's OK now anyway thanks. It seems I had to disconnect my 2nd HDD and then it booted OK. When I reconnected my 2nd HDD it started trying to boot from that but after changing the boot order in the BIOS it seems OK now. Tried that several times before (without disconnecting the 2nd HDD) and it didn't work for some reason Incidentally it still does the "reboot after pressing Del" sometimes even with F5, so I was wrong to blame F6 for that, although F6 did seem to do it more often.
Double-checking it seems I got my flashspi switches mixed up and /C clears the DMI data whilst /E clears the CMOS, which explains why it didn't clear the CMOS the second time! I think it's important to clear the CMOS when flashing, but do you think awardflash wiith the /Py /Sy /CC switches would be better or is flashspi perfectly good? As my BIOS had already been flashed with SLIC I can't know whether flashspi has flashed the SLIC data and I need to flash another board that hasn't been flashed with a SLIC BIOS yet, so need to be sure whichever tool I use will do the job.
i have G31M-ES2L rev 1 and i use flashspi with the normal autoexec.bat that gigabyte supplies, plus i added slic 2.1 your barking up an empty tree.
Well I tried awardflash and the first time it gave a "not enough memory" error which I thought might be because I'd booted freedos as a floppy and it didn't have enough room to write the backup. Then I tried booting freedos as a HDD and this time it seemed to work but kept writing for ages and then hung. I thought I might have knackered my BIOS, but luckily it was OK so I flashed again with flashspi /E /S and that went OK and cleared the CMOS data, so I think I'll stick with that!