You made your backup right?
Good. If you saw an error message during the video card BIOS flashing
process, the worst thing you can do is restart your
system, so DO NOT RESTART the computer. If incorrect
or corrupted information has been written over your video card's BIOS, you will
likely get garbled video, no picture at all, or even a dead card for your
troubles. Instead, reflash the card right away with the backup you made.
Assuming you called the backup
'backup.rom' type this from the 'A:\' prompt:
'nvflash -p -u -f
backup.rom' for Nvidia video cards using NVFLASH or
'flashrom -p 0 backup.rom'
for ATI video cards using FLASHROM.
And press ENTER.
Your old BIOS information will
be reprogrammed onto the card, and hopefully will put everything right. If you
see no errors during this process, restart and hunt for a different BIOS file to
try.
If for some reason you
restarted the system after an error, or you lost video for some other reason,
you can still salvage things, but it's going to take a little hardware. You will
need a PCI video card installed in your system before you can attempt the
rescue. Note that if you are using an Nvidia AGP card, trying to use an Nvidia PCI card to repair it may cause problems with NVFLASH. It's better to use a different brand of PCI card for this operation.
Once you have a PCI video card
installed alongside your ailing AGP card, plug the monitor into the PCI card and
boot the system with your BIOS flash disk. From the 'A:\' prompt, type the
following:
'nvflash -p -u -f
backup.rom' for Nvidia video cards using NVFLASH or
'flashrom -p 0 backup.rom'
for ATI video cards using FLASHROM
Then, press ENTER. If the
flash goes correctly, you can shut down the system, remove the PCI card and
replug your AGP video. It should be back to normal.
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