PaRaDoX_883

Ok, so. There's a story behind this so bare with me..

Last night I was given an ECS RC410L/800-M, for free, and a gig of DDRII RAM. Pretty sweet deal, but it was unknown as to wither or not the parts actually worked. And they do.

I began to test parts, I tossed the stick of DDRII RAM into my ASRock mobo, it started up, and headed into win7. But then about halfway through the loading I got a BSOD, in turn, this totaled my bootloader with Win7, and Vista Ultimate.

So, I gave up, grabbed a 15 gig HDD, dropped my new mobo in place of my old mobo, threw in the stick of RAM, tossed my CPU and ACF 7 Pro into it. Plugged it (And my 3 other HDD's) into this new mobo, along with a CD drive, and fired it up.

It worked..

Now, the board wasn't an actual ECS, it was one of those eMachine mobo's, it was the exact same as the ECS (Different color with no "ECS" printed on it), so within logic. It should take the ECS BIOS... Right? ... Right!

I downloaded a BIOS from the ECS site, it had a windows installer. I'd of done it in DOS, but it was around 3:30 AM by this point and I really wasn't going into it. It re-wrote the BIOS and returned the result that it was a "success"

I reset the computer and the image for the POST had turned to the ECS logo. Great! It goes into it's POST, and returns the error "CMOS Checksum bad" So I hit F1, go into the BIOS, and set everything up. Save & exit, the computer resets, goes through it's POST, and returns the same error with the checksum..

I took the clock battery out, turned off my PSU and left it for a few hours, I come back... Now instead of just the checksum error, it tells me the date and time are wrong too. If I go into the BIOS, and save/exit, the error with the date/time is gone, but the checksum remains..

In the actual BIOS. No settings I change are being saved. There must be an error or something in the non-volatile memory on the chip. Or something along that line.

I can, however, get the rig to start up.

I unplug my 2 backup (IDE) hard drives, plug in my 15 gig IDE drive with XP, and wait for it to post.. A few seconds before the checksum error, I un-plug my USB keyboard, it flashes something about the NVRAM, and goes into windows.

I went into the flash utility and told it to re-flash back to the old BIOS. It returns the error: "Error: Problem erasing flash"

Well, great, this could be worse, but it is still an issue that needs to be addressed, and I need some help.

Any ideas? Maybe an app that will wipe the BIOS clean, and let me start over?

Thanks in advance.

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PaRaDoX_883

This is a mix of bump and update.

I need help guys, and I don't know if people check "unanswered threads" as much as they used to.

Aside from that, I made one of my USB thumbsticks bootable today, and if I want the computer to boot off something and can't just set it in the BIOS. I un-plugged all my HDD's and just left the bootable thumbstick in the USB port, when it couldn't find any bootable devices, it went to the USB.

So I fired up AFUDOS.exe and tried many things. I am quite certain the issue here is in the NVRAM, when I try to tell AFUDOS to write only to the NVRAM then it comes up with "error: problem erasing flash 0E8000". That's about as far as I've got, I'm looking on eBay for a new BIOS chip, this board has a pop out chip instead of one that's soldered on, so there might still be hope. I'll go put up a wanted thread too.

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PaRaDoX_883

Ok, this is my last bump of the thread here, after this it can die.

I'd really like even a possible fix for this, but I'll assume that there is none.

I plan to buy a new chip off eBay, I found one in a store I trust, so at least it's not a lost cause.

Still hoping on some input.

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XinjaX

i was looking into this and if what you said is true that the board came from a emachine thats where you got screwed over...was looking into this for you and this is what i got
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ECS Support(USA) Posted
Please DO NOT flash the BIOS on your motherboard which is inside the eMachine. They have special BIOS for eMachine system.

Unfortunately, we don't have any information related to your motherboard. Please contact eMachine for more support.
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if you can find what model of emachine has that motherboard in it then you can download the bios from the emachine website and reflash it back

PaRaDoX_883

I'll be sure to look into that, but I think I might of damaged the NVRAM when I flashed it. I never found anything warning me against flashing it, but I guess there's always a chance like that, even with a smaller end cross-flash like this.

Thanks for the info, I'll try what you suggested, REP+.

*edit* I'm also going to try to pop a chip with the ECS BIOS for the ECS board into the eMachine board.

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