I just upgraded my system with:

ASRock 4coredual-VSTA
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8Ghz
Kingston DDR400 1GB


Anyway I found out the BIOS that's installed on my MB is an outdated version so I want to update it.
I went to the ASRock site and found the new BIOS and found the instructions,but my question is,
How big is the risk of me damaging my MB while trying to update my BIOS?
What`s the worst that could happen?

This post has been edited by ElFoReal: Jun 6 2007, 01:02 AM

If you follow the steps as designated by the website, you shouldn't run into any problems!

xboxrulz

Other than that, make sure nothing unusual happen, like power blackout, or some kids strip over your power cable and things like that. On top of that, there's still minor risk involved.

So far i've flashed a few mobo without any problem. It would be better if your mobo still within warranty, that way it's safe to play around. If it really fail, some mobo is cable falling back to the basic bios to do a minimal boot up, so you can flash again using floppy

Good Luck

1) no power outage (make sure nobody is doing anything that could cause a power outage)
2) no unstable system (so no overclocking set in bios)
3) follow the instructions

So far I've flashed my motherboard a lot (actualy, changing settings in my BIOS are save by flashing) and I've never had any problem.

Actually, when you save the setting in your BIOS, it's not flashed into the flash memory.
1. Flash can only be written 0. To write a new value, you need to erase it. After erasure, each bit is 1. If you write a 1 to a bit holding 0, it remains as 0
2. Flash require block erase. So you cannot just erase 1 byte, and write a new value into it, unlike eeprom
3. Almost all mobo keep the setting in the battery backed sram, either dedicated chip, or in the south bridge. That's why after you take out the battery, all your settings goes back to default
4. unless new mobo is using eeprom, which i might not aware of. So far point 3 is till valid. And chances for manufacturer to use eeprom is quite unlikely, cause in case a wrong setting prevented you to boot properly, you're stuck forever, or wait 40 years for the eeprom to loose it's memory, by chance . Where as battery backed sram, all you need to do is to pull out the battery.

My motherboard is an Abit NF7-s v2.0 and it has an nForce2 chipset. Believe when I say that it has to flash in order to save settings (that's why gives me a red box with a warning that I shouldn't turn off the computer while it's saving the settings). I don't know why it does it that way, but I remember something about something being to big or something like that, lol

Wow, that's something new. Do you mind to post a screen shot here or take a picture with a cam? It would be nice to have a look, cause seldom get to see abit NF7 board here. Thanks

sorry about the crappy quality, I'm not one of the lucky people who have a steady hand

 DSCF9974.jpg ( 116.93K ) Number of downloads: 7

Yup, that should be the correct message during a flash.

xboxrulz

Cool. Need to update my knowledge base now. But with this feature, it might seems a bit dangerous, as it flashes your bios whenever you change the settings. Hmm.....