Retail Parhelia not at retail clock speeds...

[Haig]

Will this void the warranty Haig?

Nope.

Hi Haig,could you explane the use of the utility, and which of the 2 I 've to run?

ParDw217.exe is to clock down the 220 board back to 217.

ParUp217.exe is to reset the 217 board to 220.

[wingie]

Haig please help,

Today I did a pbioswin /d c:\pinfiles.txt and saw that my retail parhelia was clocked 217 542 so I decided to run the just released updating program from matrox.

I run the 217up.exe (under windows XP) and got the message that an error had occured. Next thing I tried was to see if something had changed so I did a new pbioswin /d c:\pinfileafter.txt to see if anything had changed, this went wrong so i thought oh maybe this has to have the same filename and so i run it again and shit now the (original) file was gone and i got the following message:

ERROR ! Product information structure is invalid.

I thought shit why let's see probably nothing has changed and I rebooted my system, boy was I wrong, it started to bliep on me. So i made a startup disk, put an pci-card in my systeem change the bios so it would start with the pci-card and run progbios again but now with the /o to write the current bios to HD and afterwards with the /i option and the 971-10.bin file.

But nothing happened I still got the message:
Model: Parhelia
PCI Location: Bus:1 Dev:0 FCT:0
Graphic Bios: Version 0.0 Build 0
Product Id:
Serial EEPROM: ATMEL AT25f1024

Binary info:
Version 1.0 Build 4

ERROR ! Product information structure is invalid.

Does anyone know how to solve this and for example force the progbios program to flash the bios with the bin file

Or any other solution, do other people have this experience to!?!?!

This is the first time in my Matrox Life I have this kind of a problem with an official matrox program. (I started with the mystique (still own it), and have a g200 / g400 / parhelia

[Haig]

Alot of people here started playing with their pins, so did you ever modify anything in our bios before?

[wingie]

Haig thanks for your fast reply,

No I didn't alter the pins file (i bought the card second hand 1,5 month ago) and don't know if the previous owner has done anything with it. (he hasn't told me and as far as I remember i've asked this specifically).

When I did the first dump with the /d I got a correct pinsfile which had the 217 and the 542 entry so I don't think it has been altered.

Any solution to this, this night i'm already trying for 4 hours to repair it but no luck up to now, I even tried to undelete the pinsfile.txt but with an uneraser I can see the file but it has a filelenght of 0.

Regards,
Wingie

PS: I would like to be able to have some christmas gaming fun with my friends but then my Parhelia has to work ;-(

[wingie]

Oke some new info.

I searched around on the net and found some different pin files, I had a good look at them and compared them with the old fc command.

So I made a 'good' pinsfile and tried to flash it but still the same error message occurred.

Then I found a page that descriped bios /pin use for the good old g400 and their I saw the -k option (force) and so I went for it and flashed the bios with the 971-10.BIN file from the cd that came with my parhelia. (had to change it to /k)

And this worked, no error message anymore after a reboot I could do a new dump of the pins file but now a couple of entries are empty and on the end of the file their is something real strange.

Can you tell me how and if i've got to change this or if this is still hopeless

PS: Attached is my dump of the pins

[Haig]

Alot of pins are missing info on file including the serial # and everything labelled as 0x0000000 along with the pcbinfo and subvendor ID at the bottom.

Assuming you don't have a back up of your bios, all you can do is:

- get a copy of someone elses Parhelia bios and change the serial # to yours
- since you get no errors now , use the bios on the P cd and see if that one helps
- send it in for repairs

Regards