Gateway E3400 - Fried BIOS, need help recovering
Hi
Ok, I admit - I have no right not to make a backup. But it was late, and I felt secure that if anything goes wrong, i'll reload the Defaults as I had done once before to a different PC. (I know this is lame)
Well, the short story is the BIOS is messed up, I don't have the original disk (only the upgrade disk created from website download) and my system doesn't do zilch on boot (No beeps, no bios progress bar, no post)...So, what now? Have tried the BIOS recover using the jumper but doesn't work. See below.
Thanks in advance for all your help.
For those of you who want to read the longer version, here goes:
I have done quite a few BIOS upgrades over the years to many PCs but yesterday for the first time, the dreaded failure happened. It gave me a "Read failure" when upgrading a Gateway E3400 to the latest BIOS from the Gateway website. After asking it to retry a few times, I did a "Ignore" . It went ahead but after a few writes, again gave me the read error. So I aborted and tried it again. And it gave me the same failure. Well, I "aborted" and booted up and it was able to get back to the BIOS config but wouldn't boot to my HD. Obviously, the update had failed and the BIOS was corrupted.
Well, the Gateway site recommented to get into config and "Save" under failure so I went back to the config did that. But no avail. Then I went back into Config and did a "Reset Defaults" - that made it worse (thank you Gateway). I couldn't get into config now. It got stuck at BIOS load progress bar.
I have tried:
* using the BIOS recover jumper on Gateways. But on boot, it makes two quick beeps, goes to the floppy drive for a few secs, then does the "two beeps and floppy seek" all over again and again.
Anyone has the original BIOS for the Gateway E3400 (BIOS 0AAVE, version P06 for E-3400 (Corfu 2)), you'll become my favorite person this holidays.
Ok, I admit - I have no right not to make a backup. But it was late, and I felt secure that if anything goes wrong, i'll reload the Defaults as I had done once before to a different PC. (I know this is lame)
Well, the short story is the BIOS is messed up, I don't have the original disk (only the upgrade disk created from website download) and my system doesn't do zilch on boot (No beeps, no bios progress bar, no post)...So, what now? Have tried the BIOS recover using the jumper but doesn't work. See below.
Thanks in advance for all your help.
For those of you who want to read the longer version, here goes:
I have done quite a few BIOS upgrades over the years to many PCs but yesterday for the first time, the dreaded failure happened. It gave me a "Read failure" when upgrading a Gateway E3400 to the latest BIOS from the Gateway website. After asking it to retry a few times, I did a "Ignore" . It went ahead but after a few writes, again gave me the read error. So I aborted and tried it again. And it gave me the same failure. Well, I "aborted" and booted up and it was able to get back to the BIOS config but wouldn't boot to my HD. Obviously, the update had failed and the BIOS was corrupted.
Well, the Gateway site recommented to get into config and "Save" under failure so I went back to the config did that. But no avail. Then I went back into Config and did a "Reset Defaults" - that made it worse (thank you Gateway). I couldn't get into config now. It got stuck at BIOS load progress bar.
I have tried:
* using the BIOS recover jumper on Gateways. But on boot, it makes two quick beeps, goes to the floppy drive for a few secs, then does the "two beeps and floppy seek" all over again and again.
Anyone has the original BIOS for the Gateway E3400 (BIOS 0AAVE, version P06 for E-3400 (Corfu 2)), you'll become my favorite person this holidays.
0
Comments
If the machine doesn't post you're going to need the latter - no file in the world is going to help if you can't get far enough to boot from a floppy and use it to re-flash the chip.
If the file is all you need I'll see if I can help you track it down. It would help to have the Gateway Serial#, since every time I use their search function I either get 692 hits or none at all.
If you need to have the chip flashed you might be able to have it done at a local computer shop for a small fee. We also have a member named Tmod who can probably help you out. More info available here.
The serial # is 0023297773.
As rgding where I need a file or a flash, I was hoping that since the floppy drive is being seeked (w/o anything appearing on the screen), if I use the original BIOS on the floppy, it might work. This might turn out to be wishful thinking on my part.
In the meantime, we need to come up with a BIOS file to use. I'll keep looking for a previous version of the BIOS you're after.