Avoid Asus K7M beta bios 127

[Thundrchez]

So how many of you Asus K7M suckers were like me today and saw on www.amdzone.com that Asus released a new beta bios for the k7m?

Like a dumb lemming I downloaded it and installed it. Then my headaches begun. It started its annoying warning beep to aggravate my headache. It could not find my hard disks on the IDE channels after I upgraded! WTF? Auto detect them puppies, and nada. Hard power off and back on, and nada. Specifically set the HD's to auto, and it will boot, but it does not see anything on the IDE so it falls back to the floppy disk. Argh.

Fortunately, I had the flash program and the good ol' solid 1209 bios for the K7M on floppy disk. I went back to them, and everything is beautiful again. And it finally stopped its annoying warning beep. Geeze-man! I'm not overclocking it, I'm at default voltage, and I system monitor bios options are set to ignore.

Has anybody else had these kinds of problems with the 127 beta bios for the K7M? If you try it, make sure you have the the flash program and your current bios image on floppy and a boot floppy...you just may need it.

[Designer]

Hi, Had the same problem with 126 beta. Install the bios, go into bios setup. In the exit menu, select load optimal settings. Check page 70 in user's manual. You can set your own bios settings after the reboot.

Designer

[Zenfe]

Ya to fix the detection of IDE devices just load optimal or default settings then reboot and go back and change any other setting the way you like them.

About the beeping...this could be because of 2 different things. Both are located under the setup monitoring sections in the BIOS.
1-Make sure you have "Chassis Intrusion" set to DISABLED. This should fix it.
2-Another thing that caused my comp to beep had to do with one of the FAN monitoring things. If #1 doesn't solve your problem change all your fan monitoring to IGNORE or DISABLED.

Hope this helps because mine is running fine.

[Thundrchez]

Argh. I'm beginning to dislike Asus more and more everyday. I think that there is a 0.01% possibility that I will ever buy another Asus mobo.

[Thundrchez]

Yup, that was it. Thanks guys. A nice and intuitive "Load optimal settings" to get the bloody thing to see the hard disks and to shut up its bloody whining alarm. Asus, what are you thinking? Oh, that's the problem. Asus is not thinking. This is the only bios update that I have ever had to deal with that requires you to load default or optimal settings after a flash in order to have the system work. All of the bios settings are the same, so why is it required? Asus wants to make Athlon users life a bloody hell. OK, end of rant, for now.

[gengi]

Please, It ain't called a BETA bios for nothing you know.

[Thundrchez]

gengi, if you actually read the thread, you would have come to the overwhelming realization that this is not a bug in the bios being "beta". Please read the thread and understand what is going on before you reply in utter ignorance with a totally useless reply.

It looks as if Asus is making it standard operating procedure to force you to "load optimal settings" or "load default settings" after a bios flash if you want it to see the hard disks. This is the first motherboard in the whole world that has required that that I've worked with, and I've flashed the bios of bunches of them.

It doesn't help that Asus doesn't have the balls or technical know-how to release a non-beta version of the BIOS in over 4 months.

[Guyver]

ASUS isn't the only one...


ABIT, Gigabyte, BCM all strongly "Suggest" taht you load "DEFAULT" settings after flashing the BIOS. Actually they also suggest that all primary and secondary level cache is disabled as well as running the bios load only from a floppy drive.. (Like we really do that...)..

It just seems that ASUS is the first to "force" us to do that step in order to prevent the "unknown" or "intermittent" problems that can occur after a bios write.

I'm a firm believer in re-setting the bios after write, and have been for about 4 years now. Too many strange little bugs/problems disappeared after resetting the cmos defaults, to make it seem anything other than that.

So while I agree that it is a pain in the arse at times, it sure beats having to go out and get a new PROM every time you want a BIOS upgrade.

Guyv

[gengi]

Yes, If It's not a bug in the BIOS so why should we then avoid using it as you stated in your subject line?

Well, Loading optimal settings ain't the fix for the problem, IT IS ENABLE IDE!

Geez.

[Thundrchez]

I wrote the subject line before somebody helped me out and told me that I had to load the default or optimal bios settings in order to see the hard disks. I initally thought that the 127 bios was so screwed that it cannot even see the hard disks, and I was trying to help other people from getting burned the same way that I did.

The solution is not to enable ide. IDE is enabled in the bios after the flash. However, Asus has setup their bios flashing so that it absolutely will not see the ide disks until after you load the default or optimal bios settings.

After the bios flash, you can individually examine every single page in the bios and make sure that every setting is correct, but it will not see the disks until after you load the default or optimal settings.