No Bootscreen, no DOS, no DOS-box!

[Jadawin]

Hi there!

I have a big problem with my G400. I can't use DOS anymore. At booting, there will be no signal to the monitor until windows will show up. Inside Windows, everything works fine, except the DOS-box. Starting it will cause a immediate reboot. I can't even enter my BIOS to change some settings. I have cleared the CMOS just in case there was something wrong with my settings, and now Windows shows some hardwareconflicts. My PC is hardly usable now. I need to get into my BIOS again! HELP!
I heard that other ppl had the problem, too. Is there a solution?

[gbm]

Yes, you have to recover the BIOS. Follow the instructions at my website or contact Matrox Tech suport for Emergency Diskette image.

[xortam]

Symptoms sound like you're using the second head and don't have DOS TV enabled in you're BIOS. You can enable it in Windows through UBiosWin.exe. Alternatively, you could switch to head one. Let us know if this isn't you're setup.

[Jadawin]

Thanks a lot, I will try some of your tips this evening, I am at work now.

Jadawin

[Jadawin]

Hi there.

No, I have a OEM single head 16 mb g400.

Well, I tried to recover my g400-bios yesterday. I already had a recovery-disk and tried to flash with it, but without any noticable success. DOS screens dead, Windows works. I guessed maybe i had "recovered" an already dead bios content, so I changed the recovery-disk to flash the new 897-15 bios. After that, I made a cold boot... and the monitor got a signal! But that's all that will happen. The monitor will get a signal (59.2khz,132hz) but the PC will not even post anymore. Without the g400, the pc will beep for a videocard. What the hell has happened? I just got an old S3 PCI card and I will try to get into DOS this evening again. Maybe 897-15 isn't the right version? Where can I find an older g400 bios?

BTW, what is that dl8.exe for (on the recovery disk)?

Jadawin

[Jadawin]

BTW, I flashed the bios using

progbios -i 897-15.bin -k

as autoexec.bat on the disk.

Jadawin

[gbm]

Keep trying, you are on the right track. You may use the other VGA card fro display during BIOS recovery.
Also, are you sure that your G400 is evenly seated in its slot? This may be a cause of many strange problems.

[Jadawin]

Reseating the G400 was of course the first thing I tried and retried very often. Could the reason for my problem be caused by the fact that I haven't disabled the L1 and L2 cache in my PC-bios before flashing the g400?

Jadawin

[SteveC]

No, turning L1/L2 caches on and off makes no difference - I flash my G400's BIOS with all caches on, even video bios cache, and while my PC is overclocked - for me it makes not the blindest bit of difference.

Reflash using ubioswin in windows, or stick in the PCI card as well as the G400, (set the vga boot order to PCI first, first though, or the PCI card will be ignored on bootup!) and upgrade the BIOS on the G400. I don't know which BIOS file to use off-hand, but if it's majorly wrong, it'll tell you.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"The chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million-to-one", he said.

[Jadawin]

Well...

using an old S3 I can now see the messages of progbios.

Flashing with "-i auto" tries to flash 897-15.bin and will give the warning of "invalid checksum".

Flashing with "-i auto -k" will flash 897-15.bin. Result: PC won't boot, wont beep, but the monitor gets a signal 59khz,132hz.

Flashing with "-i backup.bin" (which is my old g400 bios, but it could have been already broken when backuped inside windows) will warn me of the older bios, but will flash when i type "Y". Result: PC will boot without signal, then enter windows and instantly reboot. This is even worse than before, when I could use windows, but no DOS.

My old "backuped" bios ist recognized as bios 1.3, the new one is called 1.5...

When dumping PINS (using old 1.3 bios) I will get a "Warning- bios is invalid" message inside the dumped text.

I have tried anything I could think of or read of. Now I asked a friend with a G400 to save his bios (using -o name.bin) and his PINS (using -d >mypins.txt) and send these files to me. I hope this will work... otherwise my G400 is gone forever. Or is there something left to try?

Jadawin

[xortam]

I think at this point you're best off having Matrox Technical Support send you a new BIOS file. I understand that the board serial number is embedded in the BIOS so you would land up using you're friend's serial number.

[Jadawin]

I wouldn't care much about using a bios with an "alien" serial number as long as it works. My G400 is a OEM card, so I will get no support from matrox.

Jadawin

[xortam]

You should be fine then. Good luck.

[Jadawin]

Is there anything inside the flashrom except the bios and the PINS? Or should flashing with PINS and bios overwrite anything inside the flashrom?

Jadawin

[gbm]

1. Can you actually copy all the messages printed by PROGBIOS -i 897-xx.bin -k ? Maybe this way I'll be able to help you.

2. The BIOS image is composed from "bare" BIOS and PInS - a 128-byte data structure holding some vital information like card S/N, clocking parameters etc. If you program the BIOS using -k option, PInS remains blank, but the card will work, since the BIOS assumes some standard, safe parameters then. Windows will have problems with recognizing the card and will assume some basic, safe parameters. So you may program the BIOS without PInS, and after you get the card working under DOS (boot screen, etc.) - put the PInS into it.

3. There is no Flash EPROM on G-series cards. The chips used are 32KB serial EEPROMS.