[Successful] Recovering from a bad BIOS flash - 5870

[rjk]

Is it possible without RMA'ing to recover from a bad BIOS flash on a couple 5870s?
Symptoms: When either of the 2 bad cards are plugged in, the motherboard hangs with an LED POST screen error number 62. Board is an ASRock 970 Extreme4.
Other cards in the same slots work fine.
I have been able to recover from a bad flash on other cards by booting from an ancient PCI video card, however these 2 cards don't let the motherboard POST properly, so I can't do that.

Suggestions?

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[2112]

Suggestions?

You could try hot-plugging. But first set up the BIOS for static assignment of resources to the PCI. I never tried this with the AMD/ATI card, but it worked for some other rare peripherals, like video capture & compression card or strange SCSI controller.

By hot-plugging I mean: power-on without the card, go past the self test, interrupt the boot manager, plug in the card, allow the boot process to continue.

[rjk]

Suggestions?

You could try hot-plugging. But first set up the BIOS for static assignment of resources to the PCI. I never tried this with the AMD/ATI card, but it worked for some other rare peripherals, like video capture & compression card or strange SCSI controller.

By hot-plugging I mean: power-on without the card, go past the self test, interrupt the boot manager, plug in the card, allow the boot process to continue.

Sounds scary. I'll have to dig through the BIOS to find that option, can't say I have ever seen it. Are there any specific ways to set that option?

[2112]

Are there any specific ways to set that option?

I'm far away from my server room, but from the memory: it is under Advanced Peripheral/IO Configuration; PCI resources. Normally everything is on Automatic. With working hardware find a correct static configuration, then remove all working cards and reboot for hot plugging of the bad one. We've done it many times flashing x86 BIOSes to the SCSI cards that had BIOSes for other architectures, like Itanium, Alpha or SPARC.

Anti-static precautions are a must.

[P4man]

To be clear: you can not boot with one working videocard in slot A and the badly flashed one in slot B? Even after reversing them?

[rjk]

To be clear: you can not boot with one working videocard in slot A and the badly flashed one in slot B? Even after reversing them?

Correct.

Status update: My BIOS does not have any such IRQ settings options, probably cause it is a gooshy GUI UEFI interface instead of a good old text based BIOS. So I decided to try it anyway.
I recall seeing a long time ago that the PCI-express specification allows for hot-plugging, but I still gave myself heart palpitations as I swapped the cards out. What happened was, I got everything working with 1 old PCI card and 1 working 5870 both connected, then I rebooted and hit F8 to cause the boot process to stop. Then, I unplugged the PCI-e connector on the good 5870. As I was readying a dead card to be plugged in, the machine decided to reboot, instead of sitting and waiting for me to insert the dead card. I inserted it anyway, and long story short it finally allowed the mobo to POST and boot properly while connected.
Once it was booted, it required 1 more reboot before the card was detected and a driver installed.

At this point, the driver is installed, and the card appears in the device manager, but that is it. I can't get cgminer to detect it, nor can I flash it with RBE. My next step is to create a boot USB with a commandline bios flash tool and a copy of a good bios and try that out.

TL;DR, 2112's method worked so far that the video card is detected and allows the mobo to POST, but I still have not been able to flash it.

[rjk]

SUCCESS! Thanks 2112 for your invaluable tips. BIOSes flashed successfully using atiflash.exe and an MSDOS boot USB after hot-swaping the PCI-e connectors from a working card to a dead one.

[shakaru]

by far some of the most heartpound reads of my life.