Afudos Engineering Edition
I’ve hopefully bought a new CPU to stick in the office server. All being well, it’ll be super quick and so on. Looking at ASUS’s website, I made sure to choose a CPU the motherboard supports.
I saw it required a BOS update, so fine that shouldn’t be hard, right?. Downloaded BIOS file (possible from ). Downloaded, burnt to CDR so I could boot into a DOS like environment. Copied BIOS file + AFUDOS update utility to USB stick. Rebooted, booted off CDR, chose to run LiveCD (No Drivers). Then tried to use AfuDos. Be good – take a backup first (afudos.exe /obiosbackup.rom.
Try and install a newer one (afudos.exe /iM3N78-1.ROM) – fails with a message like “invalid bios id in rom”. Quite unhelpful. I tried various different.rom file names, but no combination of motherboard (M3N78) and bios version name seemed to work. Eventually, Googled a LOT more, and found that there is an ‘engineering’ version of the AfuDos tool, which allows you to force the update, and ignore any stupid check. For the sake of it, I tried to restore the backup I’d taken, using the original afudos.exe, but this didn’t work (WTF?).
Downloaded ‘engineering’ afudos tool (try e.g. ). Ran with ‘afudos.exe /ibiosbackup.rom /n’ (the /n tells it to not do the stupid check) – worked OK.
Afudos Engineering Edition
Rebooted. Entered back into DOS, and ran: ‘afudos.exe /iBiosIWantToUse.rom /n. Crossed fingers, hoped I wasn’t going to brick the stupid motherboard. Success. Carry on life.
The ‘onboard’ ez-flash utility ASUS provide seems totally useless. Oh well, hopefully we’ll soon have 6 cores of goodness powering. Author Posted on Categories. I’ve had better success with the AFUWin than AFUDos – not useful for non-win servers though. OTOH, the buit-in flash tool has never been an issue (also using Asus range, inc M3N’s), though it does only support 8.3, it does the old tidle trick and still works.
Afudos Engineering Version
Virtually no flash tools care what name the file is (it recognises the file by some metadata) ‘Sometimes’ you may need to flash a previous bios to allow the newer to become accepted, which may have been your case, though simply forcing the flash did the trick too.