GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

[iansw]

Hello everyone - hoping you can help me....

A Gigabyte GA-P45-DS3R I just bought less than a week ago has lost both its main BIOS and the on-board backup Gigabyte has as a feature. Don't know how. Went to work and machine was working fine. Got home and it was BSODed in Vista. Rebooted and got a very fast "CMOS CHECKSUM FAILURE" message then got into the state I'm in now.....

Now, when booting, I get no POST screen at all, but instead an "Award Bootblock 1.0" "Scanning Hard Drive for BIOS Image" screen. Then just hangs there. Nothing else happens. (let it run 4 hours and rebooted many, many times). I had turned off the floppy drive completely because I didn't have one, and now find from reading several forums that if you do that Award Bootblock won't ask for a floppy ever. Remember again that NOTHING comes up when I boot but the Award BootBlock screen and keyboard is unresponsive. I tried hooking a floppy up anyway to see what would happen, and nothing....it doesn't even look for it.

My last thing to try was purchasing another of the same board. I then tried booting up on it, hoping the hard drive BIOS image it is supposedly looking for would be saved to the HDD by the good board. After that I then put the "bad' board back in - but no luck.....apparently the Award Bootblock software still doesn't see anything on the drive.

Last I tried a 2GB Flash Drive and then formatting an old 20GB Drive I had as FAT32, putting only the .BIN file on them, and booting up only with that drive connected, hoping it would see that BIN file. No luck. Also of course tried removing battery and clearing the CMOS jumper overnight...

I'd return the board if I could of course, but when installing the proc, a couple of pins were slightly moved. (still works fine, just is slightly moved) - Didn't notice it until I went to return. Fry's electronics has refused return and marked down the SN so I cannot ever return it. They say Gigabyte won't take it so they can't. (Gigabyte, is this true?)

Any ideas? Seems I'm out of options.....

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

Since you had a floppy previously connected can you still choose it from the F12 boot menu or not? Or did you already try this, I see you mention it but possibly not this method?

Also have you Tried removing all but one ram stick, I assume this wont help but worth a try.

If you can choose floppy from the F12 Menu I have a Method that may help you do a Blind flash. If you cannot you may just be out of luck and have to RMA

I see you mentioned the other system and drive switching. Can you do this again but in the other system flash the BIOS and be sure the HD is hooked up to the first SATA slot thru the Intel controller. And plug the drive also into the Same slot on the board that is messed up when you switch back. Flashing the new board should put the BIOS into the HPA on the disk. This must be a NON RAID or NON AHCI Setup for it to work possibly.

I am not sure if any other factors such as actual Board to Board switching would work or not But I do know the above must have happened for the BIOS to be stored to the drive

[iansw]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

Hi Lsdmeasap, thanks for responding.....

Tried 1 RAM stick in several different slots. Even tried 4 seperate sticks, (2 brands) each one in a different slot by themselvesand together. That was actually my first htought when this started, since it all started from a BSOD in Vista....

The second board I bought runs fine (same model) on all RAM sticks. That's what I'm typing this up on now....

As well, there is nowhere to hit Del, End, F12, etc, etc - I tried anyway hitting every key I could think of at boot, (All F Keys, Esc, End, Del, etc) but nothing. Just goes straight into the Award Bootblock 1.0 screen. My PS2 keyboard never even lights up or lets you turn on CAPS/NumLock, etc.

Again - no POST screen whatsoever, not even a Video BIOS Screen, just "Award Bootblock 1.0, Scanning Hard Drive for BIOS Image . . . . "

One thing - when flashing the new board to a new BIOS (Have F5, tried F7 and F8) -after reading the new BIOS and it is ready to flash - I get "CMOS Checksum = D100 - Flash? Yes/No?" - I get this with any BIOS I download, so maybe its OK - but I now don't want to flash the new board at all until I know what "Checksum = D100" means....maybe that was the cause of the first BIOS dying?

[iansw]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

Other things I tried today:

Found this link: Award 6.0 BIOS - BootBlock Recovery

This page essentially states that if you can boot to a DOS startup disk with autoexec.bat programmed to run AWDFLASH with the Force function, it will repair in the background, re-flashing your bad BIOS.

The web page above is specific to people who had Floppy as an option however. It says if you don't have the Floppy enabled it won't work and you are out of luck.

But - taking this one step further, I formatted a SATA drive and loaded the sys files for DOS onto it, and set it up like the link above shows. Tried changing autoexec.bat to point to both FLASHSPI.EXE (Gigabyte's Flasher) and AWDFLASH.EXE using the force options. Tested both flashers (bravely) on the 2nd board I have from boot and autoexec.bat scripts were definately working. Successful Flash on good board both ways.

no luck on the bad board. Did the same procedure with a bootable Flash Drive hoping maybe it would detect that. No luck either.

Also noticed HDD LED never lights up during boot.

Lesson learned - NEVER turn off Floppy as a boot device, even if you don't have a Floppy in the first place.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

YA that method will ONLY work with a floppy previously installed and set as first boot device.

I am not sure of the Checksum Number being always the same or not, I doubt it should always be the same with different BIOS's. But I guess it could be, I do know it is always shown to you though incase you wanted to be sure the checksum was correct before you flashed.

OK, So now that you have flashed the new board a few times have you put that drive into the broke board yet? If not do this now and let it try to search that disk. Plug it into The first SATA port

[iansw]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

Yeah - did that with 2 seperate SATA drives after flashing that new board 3x (once with the first drive, twice with the second) and switching over to the "bad" board with only that specific drive each time attached to the first SATA port.

No love. :(

Is there a certain Flash method to get it to make that image on the first HDD? I was using FLASHSPI.EXE once and QFlash the other 2 times....Should I use @bios instead in Windows or something? (I think now that may be what got me in trouble in the first place was flashing with @bios).

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

No, I wish I could help there. What the BIOS does is copy a copy of the BIOS into the HPA section of the disk. And I am not sure when it does this. I always thought when you flash the BIOS each time but I guess not. Maybe it is Only the first time it does this.

But if that is the case, well either way, your disk should now have a copy on it. So it is either specific to each board/disk or it has not copied it over yet. And who knows when that happens or how.

No, dont use @BIOS on your new board. I think the only thing you can do now with the old one is RMA it. Not many options left other then trying this disk method. But who knows how long that will take to copy it in there, and when it does if it will even work or not.

The bootblock is bad, and without being able to (Via Floppy) clear the Bootblock, and DMI Pool I think you would be out of luck even if it did find the BIOS in the disk possibly.

Since you already have a new board you should RMA now and get it over with and save yourself from the headache

[alf6]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

had the same problem with a Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R, what i did find out was i unpluged the hard drive and the bios auto updated.. know its old post but hope it can help others.

[alf6]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

ahhh, well it happened today aswell. F...ing MB last gigabyte MB ill own again, never ever happened to me with other's MB

didnt flash anything as my bios is newst one installed when i got it. WTF

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

For your knowledge alf6, i've had an Asus board do that too. That was the 2nd and last Asus board i owned, and it was back in the P4 days. And it needed its BIOS chip removed and hotflashed in another motherboard as Asus' craptastic emergency boot would spin the CD/read the floppy specially prepared as their website said, said it flashed, then it would show the same thing when it rebooted.

As until now, i only had one Gigabyte board do that, but it was due to pushing the clocks way beyond the instability limit, and it auto-recovered from the HDD unlike the Asus. It was a P4 board too. Never had any of this bootblock stuff since then.

[alf6]

Re: GA-EP45-DS3R - "Award Bootblock 1.0 boot"

had this for halv a year w/o any thing.it works fine sometimes, have some problem booting though but a few reset fix that. all in bios are at auto, my ram sat at 1,7(auto=1.5) seem to work better with that . only seen this bootblock 2times so far!. was about buying a asus before i unpluged my HD, but now i think not.
had a asrock that was runing fine with a p4-478.