Hello everyone, this is my first post in this forum. I have been reading this forum for a few years now but have never had a reason to post until now. After having successfully modding and flashing well over a dozen BIOS’s I have had my first failure and I have not had any luck in getting it to recover. Background: The computer is a Gateway P-7811FX laptop with a Phoenix BIOS. I installed a fresh copy of Win7 ULT 64bit and updated the BIOS to the latest available driver which is 9C.23.00 using the 64bit Windows installer. I then ran RWeverything so I could do the BIOS mod. Out of convenience and stupidity I decided to just go ahead mod 64bit installer and I now have a bricked laptop. Current Situation: The modded BIOS seemed flashed without incident and the system rebooted. After the reboot the display no longer worked and neither did an external monitor. All the normal lights (Power, media buttons, etc.) still come on at power up. If there is a flash drive inserted the LED will momentarily flicker, the DVD drive light flickers 3 times and there seems to be no hard drive activity. After about 2-3 seconds there is a barely audible beep and the laptop seems to power down for about 3 seconds. Then all the lights comes back on as above except it will now stay on until it is forced off. Recovery attempts: Most of my recovery attempts have been based around the methods in this post "forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/870-Bios-Recovery-Procedures/page46" (I cannot post links, sorry) I have tried all the key stroke combos I have come across to force a flash such as FN+ESC, FN+B, Win key+ESC, etc but none of them will cause the system to even attempt to boot from either a USB flash drive or USB floppy. If there is a CD in the drive the LED on it will flash about 14 times. I made a DOS bootable CD that will make a PC Beep 3 times on boot in hopes that the laptop was still trying to boot but with no display. Since the laptop did not beep I have no evidence that it is attempting to load an OS. I also made a bootable CD using the Phenix recovery floppy image in hopes it would force a BIOS flash but no luck yet. I am looking for ANY suggestions on how I can get an unmodded BIOS back on this machine.
I have recovered this laptop from its' BIOS crash. I wanted to update what I did so it may help others in my situation. After much searching and reading, most of which was on this forum, I started by opening the original BIOS file with the Phoenix editor. I was able to determine the emergency recovery option was enabled so I gave up on a simple fix. I then ran across some site where a guy made a SPI flash program that could use a simple to make programer using a parallel port to flash the chip. I tried to cheat and program the chip while it was still on the motherboard but when I powered the Bios chip it would back feed power to the whole bus and start the internal system clock so this was a bust. I then removed the BIOS chip with the help of a heat gun. I tried programing it but my rigged programmer could not pull it off without more work than I had time to spare. I found somebody selling pre-programmed BIOS for this model for under $30. (Note: I am not trying to sell or promote anyone I am just saying what I did. If you can get yours programed go for it.) I then soldiered it in place, put the laptop back together and I see a BIOS boot screen again.