hi b166,
I've been away form the forum a little bit. I've been caught up with work and was also trying to catch up on life in general since I had the same problem where my laptop was dead for a good 2 weeks.
I have to thank Banjo who supported me very much in resolving this issue. if it wouldn't have been for him I'd still be in a total mess.
so, from what I read you are having the same problem I was having. after changing the device ID your laptop just doesn't want to know anything about it anymore. really sad
I share your pain.
but there is a solution to this. luckily I never thought this couldn't have been done. it just took some time a combination of right files, flash memory and luck.
the first an most important thing is to actually get you to flash the laptop, doesn't really matter with what, you just have to know if the PC is doing the flashing correctly, because if it doesn't even initiate the flashing procedure then you are still very far from the solution.
a way to recognize if the system is flashing at all is after the system has booted up and read the BIOS from your floppy, USB pen or CD rom drive you should be able to hear the CPU fan spin very fast for about a minute or so.
if it spins for only 3 seconds then it stops the flashing has failed. this happened when I tried to flash a BIOS image that was 1024mb instead of a 2057mb one that the 7805u needs. same thing if the fan seems to never stop, it happened again when trying to flash a 1024mb BIOS image. it just kept going for over 5 minutes then I sensed that it just halted with no result.
I had at home 3 different usb pen and a floppy drive. hte floppy drive would allow me to initiate the flashing procedure but only with a compressed BIOS image which by the way just never worked in the end.
I then tried with CDs but it was almost impossible for me to create a bootable image af the CRISIS recovery disk, every time I would create one it would make a 1.44mb image that of course got screwed up every time I would modify it to insert the 2057mb BIOS image.
so I tried with all of the USB pen that I had at home and none of them worked. I started to think that it would just never do it with the USB pen, but guess what? I was wrong.
finally after my stubborness gave up I decided to go the the store and buy two different USB flash drives.
so I opened the first one and surprisigly after following the same procedures it worked, the system flashed from the USB drive. was the system restored? not quite yet.
it did't take me long to realize what the problem was. since I knew what it casued it I went straight to the problem and solved it.
basically, every single BIOS out there has a video BIOS installed in it.
but, when decompressing it with Phoenix BIOS Editor, what you get is a the BIOS for a geforce 9800M GTS 512mb which has device ID 0628.
this is the reason why at my first attempt, after the bios got flashed and the system restarted, it was still dead giveng the same 3 beeps.
so all i needed to do was to enter in nibitor and edit the bios and chose device ID 062C which is for a 9800M GTS 1024mb (reported in nibitor as 9800M GT 1GB).
once I finished my edit I recompiled the system bios with PBE replacing the old video bios wit hthhe new one and, on my second attempt the PC booted up just fine and I don't recall ever being happier to see that GATEWAY logo my screen that my wife opened up a chapagne bottle and we gave a toast to it
(I'm not kidding, that's how sad the situation was for about two weeks in my house).
so here is what you have to do (sorry for the long story but I needed to explain in detail what happened):
go to Office MAX or anywere they have this USB flas drive (Verbatim 2GB):
it is a 2GB flash drive, it is very important that you buy this same model. don't buy one that is bigger or one that is smaller (not a 1Gb and neither a 4GB one).
it only cost 14.99 so it's pretty affodable and trust me, it is worthh the money compared to your expensive now-worthless laptop.
so go get that USB drive and once you have it, format it with the "HP USB disk storage format utility" that you can find around. google it
then once you formatted it you are going to go to the folder where you keep the crisis recovery disk files including the bios.wph.
once there you will select by holding Crtl button the following files:
minidos.sys
phlash16.exe
bios.wph
right click on them and select under the winrar menu (if you don't have winrar installed, again google it and install it) add to archive.
give it a random name, it doesn't matter.
so right now what you are going to do is to open the crisis recovery tool for creating the USB flash pen.
once open leave everything the way it is, don't change anything and hit start to start creating partition for the USB drive.
once is over it will tell you to disconnect the USB drive, do it, pull it out od the PC then replug it in. only after you have done so you can click OK and select NO to where it says "start creating a new bootable image or something"
now double click on the winrar archive that you have just created and select extract then extract its content into the flash drive. it is important that you do it this way, if just copy and paste the files it won't work.
now you are ready to flash your bios.
turn off the PC.
now, there is a lot of controversy about removing batteries, unplugging cable, resetting CMOS ect.. I think each and every one of these procedures need to be followed for certain circumstances different than the current one.
once I even recovered an old laptop with only the battery plugged in cause it was all I had at the moment (no power in the house), and it worked.
but just in case I would remove the gateway's battery this time, since I actually did it myself, but forget about plugs ect.
just make sure that the plug is inserted into the power hole.
now, place the USB flash drive in the lower left hand side USB slot of the 7805u (but I think it would work on any other slot as well)
then hold down the buttons FN+Esc while the system is off, now power the Pc on and keep holding the key combination until you hear one single beep ( it should happen almost immediately) then release the key combination.
now just let the bios flash and wait until it reboots then hopefully you'll be siling again
I almost forgot, send me your email so that I can send you the modded BIOS. in the meantime I suggest you go buy that USB pen
so my conclusion is that, the 9800m GTS 512 and the 9800M GTS 1024 both have the same chip with device ID 0628 but the second one has waht they call a "romstrap to 062C" which turns it into a different video card.
therefore everytime you flash your BIOS, if for instance you'd have a 7811fx, your video bios would be replaced instantly, but of course it doesn't happen with a 9800M 1024 version casue apparently the system will flash it to a device ID that it is still not recognized by the system board. therefore the need to modify the system BIOS with a video BIOS specific for the 9800M 1024
with this said, I say, it's late! good night and good luck
thank you,
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
