Strange BIOS behavior

I tried to flash my bios on my P4P800 - VM board to bios version 1.16 to be able to support the CT-479 adapter. After trying to figure out which version of BIOS I needed at asus.com I thought that an upgrade to 1.08 was necessary before I could flash to 1.16. The first flash went ok, but when making the second one to version 1.16, the screen went blank. Since I didn't know any better I turned the power off and that bios chip was dead. After searching the net for any tips on how to reprogram the chip I stumbled on a method that seemed a good one. I got another identical board which I booted up inte dos "hot swapped" the bios-chips and reprogrammed the blank/corrupted one. This kind of worked.

Now I can start up with the previously bad chip, but I'm not able to save any settings to the CMOS. I get the same error as a couple of other people in this forum. CMOS settings wrong and time/date not set. And any and all changes I make are gone at the next bootup.

I might also add that the first flashes were totally unneccasary too, in my haste I mistook board revision for BIOS revision. And I flashed from 1.16 to 1.08 and back to 1.16 again. What I find strange with the now "working" chip is that the same errors occurs on both motherboards when I use that chip, which leads me to belive that it is something in the chip that is wrong. I thought that when I was flashing a chip I reprogrammed it completly. Since the verification after the flash said all ok I cant understand what is wrong. Might there be some areas of the BIOS chip that are unaffected by a flash that is causing this error?

I can't figure this one out for myself so I'm asking for your help. Does anyone know what can be causing this behavior. The board was out of the box new and I have no additional hardware installed. Only a floppy drive to flash from. And as far as I can tell the chip itself is physically undamaged, I took ESD precautions and was very careful when taking it out using proper tools. All help or tips are welcome.

Thanks in advance
Tyrfing


After some more experimenting I remembered what I did just before the board initially died. The second flash went kind of ok too, but I couldn't save to CMOS after that. Therefore I tried the recoveryfunction of the utilities cd that was shipped with the board. The BIOS on that cd was what made it die. Not the upgrade from 1.08 -> 1.16 though that made the chip unable to store any changes. Too bad I had to make the same thing twice to remeber what I did.

Finally this problem is solved, seems like I made a big mistake assuming the afudos version shipped with the utilities/driver cd was up to date. It wasn't. And the recovery bios image shipped on the same cd was completly f....d up. Probing it with Asus Update only resulted in blank letterboxes and something resembling how chineese letters look on a western computer. Trying to flash over it from there resulted in a dead end with a built in warning for trying to flash a incompatible bios image. Hmmm, thats funny. Allow me to flash using an incompatible image and the refuse me to revert the process due to incompatability issuses.

After using the "hot swap" method again to get the chip running, flashed it to 1.17 with afudos version 2.07 downloaded from a third party site, since I can't seem to find anything on asus's webpage (that is when it's not down due to massive requests or whatever they give as a reason). And it's working flawlessly again. There were some info about a boot section or something like that, may have been boot sector.. not sure, when I was flashing this time so there may be a part of the BIOS you couldn't reach before 2.07.

Anyhow must just complain about this afudos program some more, how can you make a piece of software that you constantly upgrade and not leave any info about which version you are using? Seems like they have started with that on 2.07 which clearly says version 2.07, but that's no help if your stuck with the shipped version or the from asus downloaded older versions of the program who doestn't say anything about version. Sadly this looks like something right up asus's alley, tell you to check asus webpage for updates when you are on asus webpage looking for updates. WTF?

Hope my experiences can help somebody. Check versions closely and don't trust that your product comes with up to date software.

/Tyrfing