I know this is annoying (RAID on 7811FX)

Heres the guide i used by Zfactor and ive used my stick to boot in the past so i should be capable

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=246530

 

ftp.say-it-loud.com
username sil
password silsil

use windows explorer

 

and i can just copy this over to my usb boot to get it to work?

 

Why even waste you breath? (or fingers in this case).
Maybe 3 more links would do it.

 

because...it's what i do. try to make things work where they aren't.....

 

Next time I link I'm gonna' have 'um raise their right hand and promise to use it.

 

'ello? or do i need to create an autoexec.bat file? if so, what the heck does it have to have in it and if i need any other files to flash the bios, what are they?

 

ok, here are my findings... you can not use the bios recovery option with a usb flash drive as far as i can see.
but, you can boot from a usb flash drive and flash the bios. which i just did.
your laptop has to be set to boot usb flash device/drive or whatever the next persons might say.

you doing it using a floppy or usb flash?

 

k john going to throw this one at you . Since you can recover your flash no matter what at this point. im wondering if you would try to use the utility to back up your bios that mistagill did, then reflash the normal way and when it says bad checksum just run through it and see what happens . im wondering if the bad checksum will have any real effect on it or not but with no way for me to recover at this time i cant.

 

So..syn, thanks again for the disguise. As it turns out..if anyone wants to have a no questions asked exchange..go into the local BB when they are literally locking the doors. I went to exchange counter, and she pointed me to the empty Geek Squad desk.. this guy strolls out of the back, looking like shaggy from scooby doo, except shorter. He had eight and a half hairs growing on his chin..but they were getting long..I think he was very proud of em. But, I just did my whole "What's up man? You ready to split, eh?" routine.. he was pretty cool, he asked what the problem was..told him it BSOD'd once, and he's like.."Well, let's take a look". I pull it out of the box, inform him that I bought it this morning.. And he was sympathetic. "That sucks man.. well, let's power it on". He asks if I'm exchanging, I say yes..he asks if everything's in the box..I confirm. At this point he has cracked it open, and hit the power button..as soon as everything lights up, and the Vista scroller begins to move across the screen.. He looks at me and says, "Yep, looks defective. Grab one and I'll tell the Customer Service rep." I didn't know exactly how to react, but was quick to figure it out. He shut the lid, and I smiled. I made one more comment about it being late, and him probably being more than ready to go.. He said, "Yeah..we had 2 sony's just come back..one had bad pixel, one had bad video card, and I'm not going to waste any more time with this one. That's the Best Buy Geek Squad for you". He actually said the last sentence, not me. I gave him my thanks, dug thru the small selection of 7811FXs..and went on my way. Dude was way too "I don't give a ****" cool about it.. We need more Geek Squad guys like that who inspect returns and exchanges. Put the driven ones, the motivated to prove a point ones on the repair line instead. Thank you Best Buy, for the 5th time.

 

quad...my friend.... i hate to say this...but.... you missed it all....

1: the bios i flashed WAS my backed up copy....
2: i did a backup of my bios right when i crashed it like a big dummy!
that's why my bios is back to 94.29 instead of the one from gateway 94.28.
3: if i try to open both backed up bios's they both give errors and will not open.

now don't get me wrong, because you very well could be onto something. like maybe he didn't back it up correctly or better yet, with the correct version of winphlash.

when i tried the first time to flash it back to 29, i got the famous bsod using some version of winphlash, but when i flashed in dos.. all was well and i seen the whole screen.

with a bad checksum in a blind flash, it will stop before it tries to flash. since the file isn't in the correct format/size or what ever switch or switches we're not set. i dont have a 7811 else i would exactly recreate what was going on.

the version i used is 1.3 and it seemed to work fine, but when i ran 1.6.6.7 it bsod and gave errors.(could be me or my system. who knows)

and also..your system would not know to read 7811bios.wph unless you told it too. this would also cause a checksum error. because it's looking for a different a file. and that's why there are two bios files in there. so did you try them both and get the same error?

 

I tried the bios.wph cause thats the one you said to use and also because after taking a peak at the batch file it was pointing to that file so i figured only that one would work. i just remember the other guy saying it said checksum error but offered him to continue so i tried the same thing and it offered me the same option but i chickened out in fear of a brick . im trying to figure this out for one reason only cause knowing gateway we may never see that new bios so i figured i would think of and try every option available.

 

cool quad...then we just have him do another backed up bios with a different verison of winphlash. it could very well be just that. i mean i tried to hit my bios with it and technically it should have bricked my laptop, but instead...my laptop rejected it...lol...luck? or lucky it couldn't read the file...hummmm...when he comes on, ill ask him to try another one. and he can do it under vista 64 bit. we just need the bin/rom/wph/bak file


going to try to get a backup copy using all dos commands and see what happens.

 

K man thanks for all the help its much appreciated and more so cause you dont even have the 7811 "yet" and are still willing to help us.

 

no problem!
technically none of us wants to wait. and i sure have been in E's postion with going back to best buy a few times....but when i got that right one. like the one i have now. then it's all worth it!

better to help out so that it comes back to you 10 fold!

 

Just make sure you switch up the BB stores..dont try 3 in a row at the same store..you end up using the same person at least twice. And when you walk in, the person who stickers the returns looks at you with that whole.. "Don't I know you" type of eye gesture. I'm still waiting to go in and have them tell me I've been black balled. And to whoever asked earlier, the answer is yes..every return/exchange renews your 14 day return period from the time of your most recent exchange. I have yet to pay a restocking fee with the 7811, but that's only cause 80 percent of the time it was a legit issue that warranted a defective exchange. Only once did I cheat. ..ok, maybe twice.

 

LOL I didn't recognize you right away. One heck of a disguise. I knew it would work.

I'm still laughing at your avi and the "haven't I seen you before look in their eye."

 

to late. they know me at every electronics store around here. and my name comes up in the system on returns, but at the same time...i buy way more than i return...due to stuff not being up to par, like the package says. all though frys told me i couldn't be in their store taking pictures... lol check me out comparing my new 1920x1200 screen against the competition...lol

 

This is all a bit hard to follow for me. If someone successfully gets the new 08 bios to replace the 05, could you please post a step by step of how to do it, for dummies like me. I know very little about flashing bios, but I am good at following steps.

 

usb flash

10 char

 

Hey I used it. Of course I was told later that I was just throwing a bunch of files on the drive. Thanks for the link it will come in handy in the future.

 

Okay later in this thread you try this very thing. You see the very same error. Apparently I'm not as ignorant as you think

My drive is formatted to boot. I didn't just "put some files on it." If I see the error it means the drive has booted and launched the flash application successfully. It also means I'm not in the recovery mode as I can't make it go with a usb stick and apparently neither can anyone else. All I want/need to know is if the checksum error can be attributed to the slightly different file size of the backup bios and if so can it be safely ignored?

 

This is exactly what happened to me. This is exactly my same question.

 

I think he did not respond to be safe . if he says yes and we brick our machines, while he wouldnt be responsible he may have felt guilty for it. so sometimes nothing said is the best thing . Im willing to give a few things a try but "taking one for the team" im not in the position to do atm, we can leave those types of things up to E-wrecked the Master Of Returning Stuff .

 

Alright I tried it and got a "Can not find BCP DMI block" error. Looks like the same thing happened to this person here http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3874731

 

Just tried renaming the image back to bios.bak which is what you would have if you were using your own backup. It didn't whine about the .bak extension and continued with the process but I still can't get past the "BCP DMI block" error.

Everything appears to be working as intended as frankly this is just a run of the mill bios flash being done. I don't think the recovery mode would do anything different. It's just there if you botch a flash and can't get the system to boot to launch the flash yourself.

Me thinks we have a bad bios image. Maybe like jon said he used a different version to pull the backup?

 

Ya thats what it sounds like to me as well. john flashed his with his own backup he made with the same program it just may have been a different version. So hopefully mistargill will be willing to try again only with different version of the same program . he also said it could be done in Vista64 so he wont have to format and reload another OS to do it.

 

I wonder would simply renaming the file change anything? I never tried using the original bios.bak he posted to rapidshare.

 

that original bios.bak is what john posted he just put it in the folders .

 

if bios.bak is causing the bcp dmi block error..then it is working.. However, the BIOS is not compatible with your system. That's the same issue I had attempting to flash the 94.28 BIOS on Gways support site. So, whatever you're doing..you're doing it right. If you look on the USB flash drive, does it save a file of the backup bios from your current attempt? If I remember correctly, the flash does a backup before attempting to flash a new BIOS.

 

Quick question. the bios would only let me go up to 128 for striping size. is that large enough? could this be the cause of my games slowdown?(frame drop every few seconds)

 

The stripe size shouldnt affect your gameplay but i have read others having a similar problem in the past with raid on the 6860, i think it was diablo85 and dook.

 

Its a fine stripping size, and still ALOT faster than your single drive would be. I originally had the same questions, but it appears most people use 128 anyways. I guess i was going a bit large with 256 in most people opinion

I usually prefer 256 as my preformance/size ratio, but 128 is fine (if a little less preformance orientated)

Though 512 would give you a huge preformance...but would eat up your drives REALLY quickly

 

sorry guys, but i fell asleep. it was like 3 am here.

bigddybn= sorry about that just putting files on a disk stuff, but had to be sure. my apologies sir!

mistargill, you think you could try another backup, but this time try using winphlash version 1.3?

 

Poor guy, should almost dual boot 32bit and 64bit... The flash app doesn't run at all in 64-bit? that's odd.

 

technically, he could just do it in dos mode....

 

You are going to have to keep amphetamine handy for these BIOS emergencies.

Yes please explain to mistargill how to DOS flash/backup BIOS. I'm on link sabbatical ATM. Quick thumb drive format/file copy/boot&run and it's over.

 

Oh no hard feelings at all. I'm excited about the possibility of raid and appreciate your efforts.

 

funny you should mention that. im working on that right now as we speak.
at the moment, it keeps locking up on backing up bios. very strange.

well, hopefully you will have raid by the end of the day....hopefully.

 

If you need a confirmed working way of making a usb stick bootable the post here worked for me. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3929647&postcount=136

 

pretty much how i got mine up and running

edit: ok, this is not working. it does not want to do a backup under dos.... phlash16 version 1.6.5.6. it will flash and everything else, but gets stuck if you add the backup command.

 

I can't get mine to backup or flash. Backup gives me an error saying it can't write to C: which is what the USB drive boots up as. I'm wondering if my 8gb flash drive is hitting some fat32 wall under dos.

 

For what it's worth ... I prefer using a bootable DOS CD that contains NTFS read/write. This would fix the "can't write to C" problem.

I would link but past link abuse prevents me.

 

I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.
I promise to use every link you provide.

 

im using fat myself. 2 gig flash.

what commands are you trying?

it's using the wrong commands if im not mistaken. mine was saying the same thing at first. and your usb drive should read as c: drive and not a: drive. so all commands may need to show this.

this is what im trying now: bu=backup/s=slient no beeps/x=ignore xms
phlash16 /bu /s /x /mode=3 bios.WPH

it gets to backing up old bios and just sits there looking silly.

tried this as well.... i like the ntfs read.write utility. very nice.

 

OK

Here is my NTFS (capable) Boot floppy image: http://rapidshare.com/files/146099018/NTFSBOOT.IMG.html

You may need vfd (virtual floppy drive) or WinImage to use it.
I can't get vfd to load in Vista ... stupid Vista. Ok it's a 32/64 bit issue ... I love vfd. Too bad.

 

or
just run ntf4dos from your usb flash drive by adding it to the autoexec.bat file first.

but i must agree. buy a usb floppy drive! you can never ever go wrong with this item. ever.

 

hmm i think i actually have a usb floppy drive from work sitting my closet.. Decisions Decisions.. Really need my laptop for Warhammer

 

Yes but the problem was ntfs4dos write capable was and maybe still is not free until Avira offering. Using cr*cked does open one's horizons. Legally free is my first choice when possible.

 

think you better go rethink that answer...lol

ummmm, looks pretty free to me.

http://www.free-av.com/en/products/index.html

edit: back in the days...it wasn't free.