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    Help flashing BIOS on VGN-NR140E

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by ejaf, Apr 2, 2011.

  1. ejaf

    ejaf Newbie

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    Hello...I've been searching, but can't find specific help for my issue.

    I have been given an older VAIO, which I'm trying to set up for my daughter. Put a better CPU in, that's working fine, found a 2.5 drive lying around, installed it, and clean installed Windows 7 pro 32 bit, and all was well, until I started delving into Function keys, battery issues, etc.

    I have then gone through some of the clean install guides, in order to just get some of these additional functions working. This really isn't the issue, however.

    My issue now is that I downloaded the BIOS for my particular model, that appears on the Vista download page (not the win 7 download page), since I thought that "it's bios, what's that got to do with Software?". Well, I'm learning real quick with this, since it's my first look into a laptop.

    Tried to flash by running the exe, and WBFLASH reports "Cannot read system information". I then read up, discovered that the Sony Shared Library adds some info in for DMI related things, so I proceeded to install, as per the sony website, some of the other bits, like firmware extension driver, etc.

    Still no luck...getting "Cannot read system info". I then proceeded to go into the temp folder that extracted the original exe, found winphlashF.exe, ran that, giving the WPH file name as what I wanted to load. Saw it backup the bios, and said it would restart automatically, after finished. It didn't, so I rebooted, went into BIOS, and saw the new version there and said "great, it worked".

    Since I loaded up a lot of crap, I then decided to start a clean install again, but for the life of me I can't boot from the CD (yes, I did enable boot from external device), so I'm pretty sure the bios didn't load fully. I also, when booted, get no option to boot from CD when hitting the escape key, only Windows 7.

    How do I recover from this? I'm thinking of using the method here: Bios Mods -The Best BIOS Update and Modification Source That I found on another thread, replacing BIOS.WPH with R0131J9.WPH but am afraid that it may not even be able to boot up to the USB drive. I also have a bios backup from the original run of winphlashf.exe, but don't know it's state.

    I have the back cover off (waiting for the new back cover I had to buy, due to the person ripping off the original without undoing all the screws), was wondering whether there's some way to load a default bios from CMOS, but don't even know whether that's an option.

    Any suggestion/help for the "laptop newbie" appreciated.

    Eric
     
    ejaf, Apr 2, 2011
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  2. ejaf

    ejaf Newbie

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    Weird...just as an FYI for all who may be able to help me. I'm able to boot up from a DOS fromatted USB drive, but not the DVD Drive.

    Eric
     
    ejaf, Apr 2, 2011
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