I'm about to set fire to my A8N.. please help!

[matt100]

I'm having big problems with this board.. I've had it for about 4 months and to start off with it was fine no issues at all. Recently (since a bios flash I believe but I can't pinpoint it) its started refusing to boot up first time. I have to boot, it gets to the windows screen and the blue bar just keeps tracking under the icon forever. Then I power it off, back on and it goes in fine.

Now its gotten worse, it never ever goes into windows so I've done a reformat.. it boots ok until I install the chipset drivers then it won;t complete boot. It'll boot in safe mode so I guess its a driver thing. It sometimes goes in when I pick last known good setup and if I do a system rollback it boots in once.

I went for beta 1011, just trying to go back to 1009 and its saying that because thats an earlier version I have to use the dos flash utility.. I hate DOS.. can someone give me a list of steps to follow?

Finally does my problem sound like a bios fault? windows is 100% stable when I get it in.

 

[needmorespeed]

i had that happen on my a8n-sli deluxe i flashed to a beta bios and it was unstable i used the cd that came with the mobo to boot the computer and reload the original bios and then reload the last bios that worked fine for me

 

[matt100]

so you boot with the driver cd, I have a usb floppy, can I just copy the bios 1009 onto a disc and take it from there or do I have to make it bootable etc?

like I said, I hate dos.. I try very hard to avoid it!

By the way, what bios are you using/did you decide is most stable?

 

[split]

Flash the BIOS with a bootable CD thus if you dont fancy a floppy.

If you want to know how, tell me the exact board and BIOS file you are going to use.

I guess it's one of these?

 

[matt100]

no it be this

no idea how abit and asus ended up with the same product name

 

[matt100]

hmm.. reflashed with 1011.001 and its behaving.

x64 seems ok too although I'm having to put in a bit more effort for drivers etc than I'm used to.

 

[RobP]

I've had a few problems with XP64 where every now and then it takes a while to get past the windows logo. Seems to be doing something to the hard disk whilst doing that. Can't seem to find a pattern, my PC sometimes doesn't shutdown but the last few times it's been fine and next I restart it, hard disc goes click, click, click and takes about 2 minutes to get past the logo screen. Did it this morning after PC had been off all night.

 

[matt100]

I'll watch for that although my problems have been on xp home and pro not 64.

 

[marcosscriven]

i found a very simple way to flash from CD, and doesn't require be bootable.

1) Burn BIOS file onto CD - just a plain single file
2) Restart computer
3) Press Alt-F2 as BIOS starts
4) It will then automatically find the BIOS file on the CD and install it