The chance for BIOS corruption is a readily understood risk. An improperly coded BIOS file, a bad flash routine, a power failure, and a variety of other problems can occur during the update.

Even after a failed flash, a potentially dead motherboard can possibly still be recovered. Most BIOS manufacturers (Award, Phoenix, AMI and Insyde) now include an option known as Boot Block protection. The Boot Block sector is write protected, thus it can only be damaged if the flash utility is explicitly directed by a command line switch to overwrite this EEPROM memory range. The Boot Block can load the most basic BIOS functions for the simple I/O operation of ISA video, floppy drive transfers, and keyboard input. Luckily these features are all that is generally required to rebuild the entire working BIOS.

Award Bios Recovery

This is a simple method to try to recover from a bad flash. I will be adding many more ways and AMI recovery, this is just a simple place to start.

Attach a floppy drive to the computer. Then go to bootdisk.com and create a windows 98 boot disk. If you have a DOS disk lying around this will also work. Then delete the config.sys file. If you can't see this file the make sure you can see hidden files in windows. Then if there is no config.sys file on your boot disk, open the file autoexec with notepad. Then delete anything that is in there and copy and save these lines:

@ECHO OFF
@AWDFLASH BIOSFILE.BIN /cc /py /sn /r

Take note that when you save it make sure the extension is a .bat, not a .txt. Replace the name BIOSFILE.BIN with the name of the modded bios save. Then copy the modded bios to the floppy disk with awdflash.exe and make sure the award flasher is named awdflash.exe. After, if your computer is booting drives, it should automatically pick up the floppy and reflash the bios a second time. You will see floppy activity if all is well.