ASUS K7M SlotA motherboard BIOS flashing guidance requested

Hello,

I would like to address a help request to those who are good at BIOS flashing.

I have an ASUS K7M SlotA mother board with an AMD Athlon 600 MHz CPU. Motherboard revision is 1.04 and the latest BIOS file available is version 1.32. I have found the program to use for updating it; it is called flash827.exe. I tried to update the BIOS to the latest version but without success due to that the instructuons provided by ASUS in the motherboard manual are unclear towards the end. It says that after the program has displayed the message of a succesful BIOS file written in the chip, one must "follow the instructions on the screen to correctly exit the program after which the system will automatically reboot". Unfortunatelly, that statement is not cleat to me at all. What instructions to follow? There were two options that said "Exit", one having the shortcut "Esc" and the other, the shortcut "Alt + X". So, I selected the option "Esc" and the program exited to a DOS screen with "A:\" prompt but the system has not rebooted. Believeing that all went hopefully well, I manually rebooted the PC only to discover that I was greeted by a black screen with a dead BIOS. So, I had to go to the computer store and spend 42 $ to flash the BIOS.
Out of curiosity, I entered the Flash EPROM program again so to study it. I did not update the BIOS again but pressed Alt + X, the other Exit command and it was the same story; the program exited to the DOS prompt. Shouldn't the system reboot or should it reboot only when a BIOS update is made? I did not proceed any further with the poorly given instructions by ASUS and not willing to spend another 42 $ to reflash the BIOS. I am confused and don't know how to exit the program in order to have a succesful BIOS update. The floppy I used is, of course, bootable, made by me and it was used by the technician who flashed my BIOS. I am also curious in knowing what the procedure to reprogram an erased BIOS by the technician is so that should the unfortunate happen again, I will know what to do by myself without having to go back and spend money. Should I change some jumpers on the motherboard so that the floppy drive would read from the floppy and start the the flash utility from the DOS prompt? I am currently using Windows 2000 Professional.

I would greatly appreciate any help, especially from those who have worked with flash827.exe also known as flashk7m.exe program. The current version I used is 8.27.

Thank you

the technician just cleared the cmos, then booted from the disk containing the bios and installed it. the exact installation method varies by bios.

I have found the following procedure to emply in case of an unsuccessful BIOS update resulting in an unbootable PC:

"If you have a problem flashing your BIOS, and you find that you can no longer reboot your computer, you can recover by copying the BIOS image of your choice to a fresh floppy disk (does not even have to be bootable), and renaming it to 'AMIBOOT.ROM'.
Boot your computer with this disk in the floppy drive, and it should beep once, read from the floppy, beep four times, and then reboot.
Remember to load the fail safe settings in the CMOS configuration."

Tip was provided by http://www.dbsnet.co.za/k7m/#bios

Is this true? Has anyone tried this with success? I do not want to spend yet again money on the technician flashing my BIOS.

By the way, I still need guidance from those who have used flashxxx.exe to update the ASUS K7M motherboard BIOS. The last instruction given by the ASUS manual is unclear to me:

"Follow the onscreen instructions to exit the Flash EPROM Programming Utility. The system will automatically reboot."

Does it mean by pressing Enter or Alt + X from the Main Menu? Will the system really reboot? What if I am taken back to a DOS screen at the A:\ prompt? Should I just press Ctrl + Alt + Del to reboot?

This part gave me a lot of trouble which ended with me having to bring the PC to a technician.

Thank you

I tried to use that utility as well to update my BIOS. The website says that that 132 is the latest so I downloaded that ROM and the flash and went to work. After I was done I could only boot to a floppy. The BIOS would not detect anything. I had to go to an FTP site at ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/slota/k7m/ to find a bin file to use to reset my BIOS. I did not have the problem you speak of where it would not reboot by itself. After it updated the ROM and verified it then it rebooted immediately.