[IsLNdbOi]

Alecoss, on 31 May 2010 - 01:59 PM, said:

CORRECT FLASH PROCEDURE
If you want upgrade bios please run AFUWIN utility and load a bios file after load file tab to setup option and select all box with show in picture AFU posted, in Setup/Block options/ program all blocks and in Cmos Options /Destroy CMOS checksum, after this press Flash and waiting .
After finished restart the system

BIOS FLASH PROCEDURE FAILS RESTORE PROCEDURE
If the system don't power on and the screen of H55-ITX board set to black, after bios flash, don't panic this is solution.

1) Download bios version A130PA16.ROM from internet or in attached
2) Copy file to usb pen or floppy 3,5 1,4Mb and rename to AMIBOOT.ROM
3) Connect Usb pen or USB floppy Disk Driver to USB port num. 1 near wi-fi Antenna jack
4) Power on system and press on keyboard keys CTRL + HOME and continue to hold keys
5) when the FDD or usb pen led flash release keys
6) wait few minutes and the system shut down
7) WOW the system turn on and all function correctly!!!!

I've try with my mainboard and it's okay

Regards

In attached picture of usb port, Bios version A130PA16 and White paper of ami bios

4 ZOTAC Technician : your newest bios had a problem please verify and give us more!!!

Do we need to use a USB or PS/2 keyboard for this?

Also what keys do we hold?

CTRL, + (PLUS key), and HOME

or

CTRL and HOME

?


How long did you have to hold the keys until you saw the LED flash in your flash drive?


EDIT:
Read the white paper and it's CTRL, + (PLUS key), and HOME. Doesn't say whether it should be a PS/2 or USB keyboard though.

This post has been edited by IsLNdbOi: 10 June 2010 - 04:05 AM

[IsLNdbOi]

Yeah, my BIOS is fried. I think the boot block on both boards' BIOSes are damaged so the recovery methods won't work. It's ok though, just called Amazon.com up and they've already processed replacements that are shipping today via FedEx Next Day Air.

[chlore]

Using the recovering procedure using lastest bios from zotac my motherboard is now working (it was not working with the bios supplied by Alecoss)


Thanks to Alecoss for the trick. (and shame on zotac support)

This post has been edited by chlore: 14 June 2010 - 07:45 AM

[athan]

chlore, on 14 June 2010 - 07:44 AM, said:

(and shame on zotac support)

What Zotac "support"? There's no such thing!

[tristan]

Using this method I can not boot my board again (thanks for posting this!)
however, I now get a "cmos checksum bad" error every time i boot, (i've tried cmos resets, different battery with no luck), and a "error can't analyze the IIM information" message when trying to run afudos again, so The board is still no good to me.

Unfortunately I can't RMA it since the serial number sticker on the bottom got torn when I was installing a Corsair H50 cpu cooler, So I guess i'm gonna have to fork out the dough for a new board, and it's not gonna be another zotac.

[tristan]

Hi again,

I'm curious, what is the model of the BIOS chip that was on the board that alex's A130PA16 rom was made from?
When I open up Afuwin now, It has some weird values for the chip.
on the chip itself, it says it's a winbond 25Q32BVAIG, but afuwin says "WOINBOND W25/Q80", so i'm wondering now if the A130PA16 rom alex supplied is meant for a different BIOS chip than what my board has (especially since afuwin spells WOINBOND instead of winbond).

I wouldn't be surprised if they had different chips, since i've seen some boards with a Atheros wifi card and some with a RaLink wifi card, who's to say they didn't change which BIOS chips are in the boards as well? Also my board came stock with the A130PA18 rom, so maybe the earlier one is causing my problems? Of course Zotac says that there are no different revisions of the board, so this shouldn't really be a problem right?!

does anyone have a copy of the A130PA18 bios rom (and can confirm the same BIOS chip as i listed above)?
foolishly I didn't bother saving the bios when I attempted my flash (what could have possibly gone wrong, right?!), I'm playing with the linux flashrom utility to try fix my issue, and in the hope that I actually get it to flash the bios, it would be good to have the original bios to work with.

Thanks

[dholm]

tristan, on 23 June 2010 - 12:55 AM, said:

Hi again,

I'm curious, what is the model of the BIOS chip that was on the board that alex's A130PA16 rom was made from?
When I open up Afuwin now, It has some weird values for the chip.
on the chip itself, it says it's a winbond 25Q32BVAIG, but afuwin says "WOINBOND W25/Q80", so i'm wondering now if the A130PA16 rom alex supplied is meant for a different BIOS chip than what my board has (especially since afuwin spells WOINBOND instead of winbond).

I bricked mine as well and got a replacement at the dealer today. It still says WOINBOND so I guess it's just a spelling error not BIOS corruption. I also have a 25Q32BVAIG.

tristan said:

I wouldn't be surprised if they had different chips, since i've seen some boards with a Atheros wifi card and some with a RaLink wifi card, who's to say they didn't change which BIOS chips are in the boards as well? Also my board came stock with the A130PA18 rom, so maybe the earlier one is causing my problems? Of course Zotac says that there are no different revisions of the board, so this shouldn't really be a problem right?!

I'm gonna go with the theory of another poster here and bet they did something very wrong with the boot block since the AMIBIOS rescue mode doesn't work.

tristan said:

does anyone have a copy of the A130PA18 bios rom (and can confirm the same BIOS chip as i listed above)?
foolishly I didn't bother saving the bios when I attempted my flash (what could have possibly gone wrong, right?!), I'm playing with the linux flashrom utility to try fix my issue, and in the hope that I actually get it to flash the bios, it would be good to have the original bios to work with.

Thanks

I have attached A130PA18.ROM from my newly acquired board by like I said, if the boot block is bricked you might not be able to restore it.

Sincerely,
David

Attached File(s)

•  A130PA18.ROM.zip (572.37K)
  Number of downloads: 326

[supaahiro]

If you are getting "error can't analyze the IIM information" you can try using the latest AFUDOS from AMI, which can be found here.

[tristan]

I had tried the latest AFUDOS which simply gives the same error.

Thanks for posting that dholm, but I shouldn't be needing it now. I decided to email zotac support directly (i emailed the .de address since i'm in germany) and explain my circumstances (failed bios flash, ripping the serial number so the store i bought it from wouldn't RMA it, getting it booting again with this method and the cmos, IIM issue) and after a week I got a reply from them asking for my address and MAC of the ethernet controller, and that they would send me a new chip in the mail (which i'm still waiting on now, I think it's coming from China).

So, if you get into the same problem as i did, try email zotac support and see if they can help you out too!

[Tros]

Okay. So this was a real pain to figure out, and I thought my boot-block was fried as well. Because I'd get these symptoms after these steps:

Plug in USB-drive into the lowest USB-port, next to Wi-Fi antennas.
Power on machine
Holding CTRL plus HOME immediately, and waiting for a while.

Nothing (20~ seconds).
USB-stick flashes for a bit (10~ seconds).
Nothing (4~ seconds).
USB-stick just stays on for a bit (~4 seconds?).
Repeat from the first "Nothing."


And that sucked! I thought it was bonked forever, and I'd have to rewrite the BIOS by hand through an SPI interface. But it turns out, the bootblock won't read from FAT32 filesystems, which if you have a USB-stick over 2GB, is pretty much your only choice for filesystem by default.

So I did these things from my Mac. There's probably analogs for Linux and Windows as well. But I found myself surrounded by locked-down windows machines, and macs. So I chose the Mac-way. My flash-drive is complicated because of it's big size. Smaller ones (<2G) will have an easier time. and don't need to do as much.

1) Backup any of your goodies on said USB-drive. This is easy on Mac with the "create image" function. Linux users may want to use dd, and Windows users probably don't do anything special with their drives, and will just copy+paste all files and folders to another drive.
2) Open up Disk Utility.
3) Click on the USB-drive itself in the left pane, not the partitions themselves.
4) On the right pane, from the tabs, choose "partition".
5) Above the map of partitions, and below "Volume Scheme", choose "2 Partitions".
That first partition is for formatting (later), and that second partition is just to waste space.
6) Under "Options", below the "Volume Scheme", make sure that "MBR" format is chosen, instead of AFS/GUID.
7) Select the first partition, and resize it to something small. "0.5 Gigabytes"
8) Name it something, to make things easier. ALL-CAPS, and no_spaces. "BIOSSAVE"
9) Name the second partition something dumb, "DELETEME"
10) Press "Apply". There's still a lot to do, don't worry about all these loose ends. Disk Utility shouldn't take long, and before long you should have "BIOSSAVE" and "DELETEME" in the left-hand panel for disks to work with.
11) Close "Disk Utility".
12) Open "Terminal". You don't need administrative rights.
13) Reformat "BIOSSAVE" as a FAT16 partition with the following command (with quotes!):
diskutil eraseVolume "MS-DOS FAT16" BIOSSAVE /Volumes/BIOSSAVE
14) That above command is effectively a reformat, of the FAT16 variety, with the name BIOSSAVE for the new partition, on whatever partition is mounted at /Volumes/BIOSSAVE.
15) Figure out which /dev/disk# your flash-drive is. This is best done by "mount".
16) Type in the following command:
mount
17) The list will have an entry like:
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/BIOSSAVE (blah, blah, blah)
18) This indicates that your flash-drive is on /dev/disk3. /dev/disk4s2 would indicate your flash-drive is on /dev/disk4. /dev/disk8s1 would indicate that your flash-drive is on /dev/disk8.
19) Type in the following command:
diskutil umount /Volumes/BIOSSAVE
20) Type in the following command:
diskutil umount /Volumes/DELETEME
21) Now we can modify the MBR without rebooting. Type in the following command, except replace /dev/disk8 with whichever your flash-drive is:
fdisk -e /dev/disk8
22) (This part is a little fuzzy for me, verbatim instructions may be bad).
Press "e","ENTER" to edit a partition, then press "2","ENTER" to change partition #2, then type in "0","ENTER" to disable the second partition. The volume known as "DELETEME" is now disabled.
23) press "w" to commit these changes to disk, followed by "y" to confirm, and "q" to quit.

24) /Volumes/BIOSSAVE should be auto-mounted back on the desktop, now the MBR's been modified. If not, pull out your flash drive (not immediately after rewriting the MBR), and plug it back in.

25) Drag and drop "AMIBOOT.ROM" into your flash-drive. Eject.

26) Power down your non-functioning machine. Plug in the flash-drive into the lowest USB-port, right next to the Wi-Fi antennae.
27) I plugged in a USB-keyboard into the USB-port, to the right, of the flash drive. But I think you may not even need a keyboard.
28) Boot up the system, and immediately (after power) hold down "CTRL" and "HOME".
29) A few seconds after your flash-drive starts to flash, release the keys, maybe not necessary.
30) Your machine should now shut itself down in 10 seconds. My flash-drive is pretty fast, so it was like 3 seconds, so YMMV. But it shouldn't show inactivity for 20 seconds or so, and then look like it's trying the same thing.
31) Remove flash-drive, power on machine, and hopefully you'll get something nice .

I kept my monitor + GPU plugged in during this procedure, but removed what else I could. I didn't change the jumper for "CMOS clear" either (this time, but I had many times before). I find it's too hard to access. Most people are messing up on the FAT32 versus FAT16 / FAT12 formatting, I bet.

Good luck!

This post has been edited by Tros: 10 July 2010 - 08:52 AM

[Ebu Salih]

Hi Guys, my first post on this forum.

I bought my h55-itx at Micro Center a couple days ago. Turbo boost worked on it from the get go with BIOS ending in 18.

Knowing all the BIOS update bricks, I was not going to flash the BIOS but then I saw this post and saw that if it does die I can try to recover it.

Sure enough after I flashed the BIOS it bricked. One thing I noticed is on the AMI windows flash utility (had to get the latest off AMI's website to work in Win7 64), the top bar of memory sectors never went green, it stayed grey. I followed all the instruction except i did not do a shutdown after the Flash, I did a reboot... maybe what causes the brick?

But anyway I will talk about how I recovered now.

I tried both a FAT32 and FAT16 formatted USB Flash, but both did not work. In the end a USB Floppy worked.

When the FAT32 key was inserted behaved as so, one beep every ~15 seconds. USB Flash LED would flash after about 4 seconds then stop, nothing else except the beeping. (Ctrl+Home did not execute anything)

When the FAT16 key was inserted there was 2 beeps short gap, 5 beeps short gap, 1 beep, and then that last single beep would repeat every ~3 seconds. (again Ctrl+Home did not execute anything) USB Flash LED would flash after about 4 seconds then stop as with the FAT32.

Then I dug up an old USB-Floppy and hunted for a Floppy Disk.... after I dusted everything off I plugged the USB Floppy with AMIBOOT.ROM (Latest BIOS ending in 19 that is suppose to fix S3 resume). I did not have to hit Ctrl+Home or anything, on the first boot the disk started being read and within about ~20 it stopped reading from the disk and went BEEP and rebooted. My mini computer was alive again and now the S3 resume was working.

It was music to my ears to here the chriping of the normal bios post.

So if your usb key's are not working (I just tried formatting them in Windows) then give a usb floppy a shot.

Thanks for the posters for giving me the knowledge to ge this done. There is a BIOS Recovery/Error Codes manual by AMI that discuesses beep codes and the such. If I get some time (probably not) I'll see if I can't figure out what those beeps mean.

[Nathangunn]

Hi,

I conduct the recovery procedure using a USB floppy and a PS2 keyboard.

It seems to read of the disk for about 45 seconds and then nothing. I reboot it but I still get the same black screen.

I have tried many different versions of the BIOS but still no look.

Any suggestions?

[Ebu Salih]

Nathangunn, on 04 August 2010 - 09:02 AM, said:

Hi,

I conduct the recovery procedure using a USB floppy and a PS2 keyboard.

It seems to read of the disk for about 45 seconds and then nothing. I reboot it but I still get the same black screen.

I have tried many different versions of the BIOS but still no look.

Any suggestions?

It sounds like it is re-writing your bios but it is still failing.

Try another floppy, floppies are old and unreliable media. Try formatting it to FAT16 again and re-adding the file. Make sure your BIOS file name is AMIBOOT.ROM. Try the new BETA bios online.

[kataleen]

Did anyone else try this new BIOS version?
Since I don't have an old floppy drive, I am still somewhat reluctant to flash the bios.

Thanks

[Nomader]

ok just to help..
i had the same problem after a bios flash..
i tried the recovery method but nothing would happen.. i tried a floppy and a usb stick formatted fat16...nothing
i tried latest bios and the one recommended on first post...nothing..
it would read read and stop..then nothing

it only worked when i tried version 18 of the bios provided by a user on this topic..on a usb stick fat16..
everything OK now

[drw1710]

I really like using Zotac products, but the total lack of a proper bios upgrade utlity has me looking elsewhere for motherboards. Very seldom do you hear of an Intel, Gigabyte or even a lowly Dell bricking during a bios upgrade, but you see this happen time and time again to Zotac boards no matter what the flavor. ZOTAC it is time to use a proper Bios flash Utility!!!!!!

[Jens Kristian]

Are the problems still there on the newest version, A146PA07.ROM? And should I use the guide on the first post when flashing my new board?

Update: No problems with A146PA07.ROM.

This post has been edited by Jens Kristian: 12 July 2011 - 06:17 AM