So I've found a modded BIOS for my MSI K7N2 Delta L that will allow me to increase my memory voltage to 2.8v (currently it only goes up to 2.7....apparently 2.8 is the most the board will support without a physical board modification) and also give me some other neato settings. And here is where my problems start. I don't have a floppy drive. So I figure I will flash from a cd-rom. Well...I'm also running a non-FAT32 file system. I've heard that I need to use a windows 98 boot disk (the one that you use to install it) and that it will load up with cd-rom support and a ramdrive. Then I should copy the flash program and the new BIOS into the ramdrive and execute them from there. That sounds all well and good...I have a bootable cd-rom which is an exact image of my old windows 98 boot disk. I pop it in, it does it's thing and I get to a command prompt... A:\> So I figured A must be the ramdrive right? Cause I don't have a floppy. And I can see that it has set my cd drive to D. But I can not copy anything to A. So maybe it's not a ramdrive? What am I doing wrong? Maybe there is an easier way to do this? Anyone?
MSI probably have a Windows flash tool like Abit, Asus and probably several others have. Very easy and just as good as "the old way".
No luck with that. C and E (every letter besides D) tells me it's an invalid drive letter. When I run dir on A I see the contents of the boot disk...kind of. Looks like most of the files. And D: is of course the cd drive. I have not found an MSI windows flash utility. I would suppose it should be on their site somewhere...I'll look for that for a while.
Okay....so I've found this site to create a "clean" bootable cd for BIOS flashing: http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/#clean Has anyone ever tried this? So far as I can tell you have to add the flash program and the ROM to the image and then add the command to run it in the autorun.bat and will load up a clean boot and automatically run the flash program. I guess that is as safe as flashing the old fashion way as long as I type everything in the autorun correctly. But somehow I feel more secure doing it all manually. But if I can't....maybe this is worth a try? I'm scared...I can't live without my computer if I screw this up.
Of course the easiest way would be to beg/steal/borrow a floppy drive. Cant you create a boot cd-rom with DOS/utils on it. Then create a ramdrive yourself, and copy the files to the ramdrive. Then run it from there.
Actually last night I started thinking about something along those lines Hippo. But my concern is this....if I can't get a RAM drive to work from the bootable cd I have, even if I use the floppy I'm gonna have the same issue. Cause the cd is an image of the floppy. I have a few more ideas that I'm gonna try to play with at work if I don't get to busy coding. Maybe I should just be content with what I'm running now and not worry about it. Cause if I screw up a flash and really mess something up I'm gonna be pissed...and not the drunk kind.
Why do I make things so hard on myself? I think I may have found the solution! EUREEEEKA!! I found a WinME boot disk and tried it out on the machine here at work and it seems to create the RAM disk and everything works beautifully. So, I'll make a cd version of this disk and try that tonite. Hopefully the next time I post in this thread will be from my newly flashed and purrrring machine from home.
Well...here I am from my newly flashed box. Woohoo! I wasn't ever able to get a bootable cd-rom to work like I wanted. So I ended up pilfering a floppy drive and doing it the old fashion way. Not sure why the whole bootable cd thing wasn't working. Oh well. Maybe I'll work on that in my spare time. hehe Anyway...now I have been able to up my memory voltage to 2.8v and I can get the timings to show CL 2.5 in CPU-Z...I wasn't ever able to do that before. Maybe one day I'll get some good ram....errrr...fast ram. Also, I can now disable super stability mode...something that I think MSI had permanently enabled before. And as an added bonus....the CPU temperature now reads much more correctly. Overall I'd say I'm a happy boy tonite.
