EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

[chenxuwen]

Hi.

I have a few technical question about the BIOS of EP45-DQ6.
I got a board EP45-DQ6 with F2 initial bios about a month ago. At the very first boot, it was OK. Then at the second boot, I used the tool in the BIOS to flash the new bios 13d. The board bricked in the sense that it keeps rebooting itself and shuts down without any posting. Apparently the dual bios function doesn't come into play at all. Could you tell me why? What is the safe way to flash the bios? With dos (flshspi.exe) ?
I tried clearing cmos, taking out the battery. Or attach a dvd-rom with the disc came with the board inside.
I RMAed the board and havn't got it back yet. Really want to know why this happened.

Another scenario, I was trying to put the new Intel boot rom, both the AHCI and raid rom into the stock bios F2. And I experimented these roms with ASUS P5Q PRO before. I used CBROM32. Then after flashing, another EP45-DQ6 is bricked with exactly the same thing as described above. I kept thinking how to trigger the dual bios restoration or just a boot block to recover the bios is fine.

After bricking two boards, I wonder how dual bios works, why flashing an official bios with qflash would brick the board, also why only modding the PCI rom part in a working bios would brick the board.

As Gigabyte advertised, the back up bios would take action whenever the first one is not working. Then how does it work. In both scenes, there are no action taken by the back up bioses. And the bootblock (the way we usually do to resore the bios) didn't pop up either, even with a PCI video card.

Then on the second board, I went further. I cut the power pin of the M bios. If the back up bios actually storage something and it would take action, then the missing of the M bios would trigger the back up bios, right? However, nothing happened. The second board remained what it is, keeps rebooting and no post. Then I desoldered the M bios. Still, no back up bios action. The board remained bricked.

I got totally confused. So the next step would be desolder the back up bios and solder it on the M bios place. However, still no go.

So why didn't a boot block show up in either case? And how to trigger dual bios?

I googled it many times. It loos like many people have the same issue as mine. Some of them tried SLIC. Some of them just flashed the official bios.
So there is some defect on the dual bios design or just the flashing procedure.
I still don't understand the dual bios and this gigabyte rebooting bug.

Could you give an explanation as an engineer?

[chenxuwen]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

One update:
Before trying the soldering iron on the second board, I've tried shorting pin1 and pin 8 of the M_Bios when press the power button to see whether it boots as many people said and I found that on the BIOS chipset pdf. No go.
No Back Up Bios came in.

[oc nub]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

I am curious to find out the answer to the problem you are having. Maybe Lsdmeasap will be able to help.

[chenxuwen]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

I am curious to find out the answer to the problem you are having. Maybe Lsdmeasap will be able to help.

I want to know too.
So.. bump...

But I thought about it again.
Maybe I didn't leave much to answer. If the engineer answers true, all these won't do trigger. Then people would be worried. Or if he answers two boards are both defected, not many people would believe that.

I don't know. Really want to know why.

[profJim]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

Lsdme has a post in this forum that covers jumpering the main bios chip pins to trigger copying the backup bios chip to the main bios chip. As I recall, on the ep45-ud3x mobos, it was pins 5 & 6.

MyDigitalLife.com has a thread that covers the procedure, but I think that they claimed success jumpering different pins on the main bios chip.

Try searching the forum and the internet using:
bios recovery

I'll post back later when I have more time with additional information.

The following has helped when your mobo isn't fully bricked:
1) Let the boot loop continue for 6 -12 times to see if it recovers.
2) Boot with only 1 memory module in slot 1 with a minimal hardware setup.
3) Clear the CMOS by doing the following:
- shutdown your system
- power off your psu and unplug the AC power cable
- press and hold the front panel on/off switch for 10 seconds
- remove the mobo battery
- place a jumper block on the CLR_CMOS pins for at least 20 minutes, some have had success when the pins are jumpered for several hours; some required 12 - 24 hours before their systems successfully booted

[chenxuwen]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

Lsdme has a post in this forum that covers jumpering the main bios chip pins to trigger copying the backup bios chip to the main bios chip. As I recall, on the ep45-ud3x mobos, it was pins 5 & 6.

MyDigitalLife.com has a thread that covers the procedure, but I think that they claimed success jumpering different pins on the main bios chip.

Try searching the forum and the internet using:
bios recovery

I'll post back later when I have more time with additional information.

The following has helped when your mobo isn't fully bricked:
1) Let the boot loop continue for 6 -12 times to see if it recovers.
2) Boot with only 1 memory module in slot 1 with a minimal hardware setup.
3) Clear the CMOS by doing the following:
- shutdown your system
- power off your psu and unplug the AC power cable
- press and hold the front panel on/off switch for 10 seconds
- remove the mobo battery
- place a jumper block on the CLR_CMOS pins for at least 20 minutes, some have had success when the pins are jumpered for several hours; some required 12 - 24 hours before their systems successfully booted

Thanks for replying. I've tried 1)~3) combined. I am not kidding. I tried quite a bit of things. Try putting VDD to the chip select pin. Putting 5-6 to stop the out put of the bios for a while. But didn't pop out.

I don't have a floopy. But if should be OK for a PCI video card to pop up. Also QD6 includes a quad bios which allows the board to read bios from a dvd-rom. I've tried this. So quad bios also fails in this case.

What do you guys think?

[profJim]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

BIOS flashing: A "How to fix dead dual BIOS motherboard if flashing failed" is the TT thread that discusses two different methods of jumpering the main bios chip so that the backup bios will be copied to the main bios chip. This thread has a link to a post on XtremeSystems where he unbricks a different Gigabyte mobo that has a similar dual bios chip setup. The post on XS has a link to the (very long) MyDigitalLife thread.

Note: Lsdme considers this procedure a last resort for bricked motherboards.

My 2 cents:

• The dual bios feature works sometimes but not all of the time.
• I've had no problem using Qflash to flash my saved bios profiles from a fat16 floppy or fat32 disk partition. This assumes that the bios file is not corrupted.
• GB "virtual dual bios" is a single bios chip setup that is different.

[chenxuwen]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

BIOS flashing: A "How to fix dead dual BIOS motherboard if flashing failed" is the TT thread that discusses two different methods of jumpering the main bios chip so that the backup bios will be copied to the main bios chip. This thread has a link to a post on XtremeSystems where he unbricks a different Gigabyte mobo that has a similar dual bios chip setup. The post on XS has a link to the (very long) MyDigitalLife thread.

Note: Lsdme considers this procedure a last resort for bricked motherboards.

My 2 cents:

• The dual bios feature works sometimes but not all of the time.
• I've had no problem using Qflash to flash my saved bios profiles from a fat16 floppy or fat32 disk partition. This assumes that the bios file is not corrupted.
• GB "virtual dual bios" is a single bios chip setup that is different.

Thanks! I am not sure these will work either. I soldered the back up bios to the m bios position. But not go. I wonder whether there is anything in the back Up bios.

[wazza300]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

i think the newer bios's flash both main and backup when you flash them so it might both contain the same bios

[profJim]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

As I recall, there is often a "timing" issue when jumpering a pair of pins on the main bios chip. Jumper the pins too soon or too late (relative to powering on the system), and nothing happens. I don't remember anyone posting what timing "trick" got their systems working, rather some had to try it many, many times before they succeeded. I've never tried hot flashing any mobo's but it's a pretty much a moot point with soldered bios chips.

Given the less than optimal success rate for mobo automatic bios recovery, it's possible that the backup bios is corrupted.

On trick that might work is if you install a valid copy of your mobo's bios in the root directory of a fat32 partition on a hard drive and then to try booting with the hard drive connected to the mobo. On my 3 GB systems, I've seen the following unnerving message several times:
"Searching for a copy of the bios on your hard drives"
So much for a "safe" copy of the bios on the backup chip.

My EP45-UD3P (v1.0) suddenly powered off, even though it is connected to a UPS. My mobo refuses to power on, even though I've tried different cpu, psu, memory, video card, etc. Manually jumpering pins 15 & 16 (black and green) on the 24-pin mobo connector (while it is plugged into the mobo) lights up the mobo, the fan's spin, but it refuses to post/boot.

[ziddiri]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

I've found this information did work on me. I've found this in "http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/260048-30-gigabyte-ep43-with-dual-bios-black-screen-bios-update". This isn't my solution, so don't ask me details:

I don't know have somebody ever find this, but I've found a new and quick solution for loading backup bios :) I've tried a lot of solutions for loading backup bios over main bios, but none of them is a quick solution. Every solution was taken hours. But I've found a qucik way.
I must mod bios with gpxe, so I'm updating bios regularly. Sometimes, modding bios with gpxe is failed, so my machine doesn't start because of dead bios. So everytime I must recover bios with backup bios. But it is interesting thing that gigabyte's dual bios algortihm can't detect sometimes that main bios is started or not. So, we should disable the main bios awhile for loading the backup bios. I tried a lot of things, connecting VSS and HOLD# pins(previous post), shortening 5-6 pins, floppy, usb, etc.. I've been success with 5-6 pins method two times. But this method takes one hour or more, and it is some tiring. So I decided to examine the diagram of the flash spi chip that @Phaeilo gives the link (http://www.sst.com/dotAsset/40504). After I examine it, I've realized that if I connect CE(Chip enable) and SCK(Clock), the main bios's CE cycle will be broken. If you look at the document you'll see that the chip starts working when the CE cycle goes to low from high state. If I connect to SCK with CE, then every cycle(beat) of the clock the CE's state change low to high then high to low, etc.. So backup bios can see that the main bios is not enable.


I'm not responsible if your mb is dead, I don't give any guaranty. if you want to fix your dead bios which has a backup bios and if the backup bios is not loading, then you can try this method. In Brief, you should have steady hands, a piece of wire(maybe paper clip). Power off the machine. Connect CE and SCK pins(1 and 6 pins). Then turn on the machine, but you should remove the wire after a second. I don't know excatly when you should remove the wire, but wou shouldn't wait long than 2 second. After that you should hear a beep sound. And you should see that backup bios wirtes on the main bios. Wait until the process is finished. After that the machine will restart.


My mb is Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H(rev 1.0). A final notice is that don't touch VDD pin never(I was shocked :) ).


Regards.

[locoboy]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

I've found this information did work on me. I've found this in "http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/260048-30-gigabyte-ep43-with-dual-bios-black-screen-bios-update". This isn't my solution, so don't ask me details:

Can i try this on my mb GIGABYTE GA MA 790 FX DS5 ...? I'v see P.O.S.T. screen an continaullyreset, cant'go further to win. can't go in setup and can't go in Qflash ....it write on screen preparing to go in setup but only reset(btw sorry for my bad english)
my email is [email protected]
tnx in advance!
P.S. at first bios was blocked (bricked) than i try with pin 4&7 nad pc is alive again but only till post screen

[profJim]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

You should NOT include your email address in a post, because spammer's might add it to their lists.
We will reply in this thread.
Try posting with a minimal hardware setup; cpu, only one memory module, keyboard and graphics card.
Disconnect all hardware that isn't required for entering the bios.
Once you can enter the bios, load optimized bios defaults and then save settings and exit.
Re-enter the bios and make any required bios changes for your memory, save settings and exit, and then turn off your system so that you can connect your hard drive to be able to boot to your operating system.

Can you test with another power supply?
Your power supply might be part of the problem.

[locoboy]

Re: EP45-DQ6 BIOS PROBLEMs and DUAL BIOS trigger mechanism

You should NOT include your email address in a post, because spammer's might add it to their lists.
We will reply in this thread.
Try posting with a minimal hardware setup; cpu, only one memory module, keyboard and graphics card.
Disconnect all hardware that isn't required for entering the bios.
Once you can enter the bios, load optimized bios defaults and then save settings and exit.
Re-enter the bios and make any required bios changes for your memory, save settings and exit, and then turn off your system so that you can connect your hard drive to be able to boot to your operating system.

Can you test with another power supply?
Your power supply might be part of the problem.

yeahhhh, i did it ...over my epromm programator.i then unsolder(hot air on 349C) main bios from MB then solder on add-on for eprogram...put add-on,put in programator then found bios on gigabyte web site,and add over software in my chip,then again solder on MB...job done in 15 min...a tried every way to get bios from backup bios chip but in that bios is only basic instruction...now all is 100% ok