Re: VIA KT133 data corruption update

[Jan Niehusmann <jan@gondor.com>]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 03:48:56AM -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> After several months of begrudgingly putting up with my ASUS A7V
> motherboard corrupting roughly 1 byte per 100 million read during
> moderate to heavy PCI bus activity, I flashed VIA's 1009 BIOS this
> evening.

Please note that there have been broken versions of the 1009 BIOS
around. I know one person, and I read from serveral ones, who flashed
1009 to their A7V and were unable to start the computer afterwards.
(Hangs before/during POST).

Apparently ASUS has replaced the broken version with a working one
without updating the version number. But that's just a guess based on
recent success stories about 1009.

> I also discovered, of necessity, a halfway manageable process for
> creating a DOS boot floppy using Windows ME, which Microsoft would
> apparently prefer was not possible.  I'll reproduce the steps here,
> since otherwise flashing a new BIOS is likely to be nightmarish for
> people stuck dual booting into WinME.

As I don't use Windows at all, FreeDOS has proven very useful for 
flashing the bios. (www.freedos.org)
But, of course, no guarantees.

Jan