After flashing BIOS, do you have to reinstall OS?

[troysvihl]

Been having random crashes and freezes ever since I upgraded my mobo and CPU. (A7V333 and Athlon2000+) Can't figure it out. They don't happen often, but enough so they're annoying.

So, I thought I'd give a newer BIOS a try.

I flashed it. Everything looked good until I booted back up. Then WinXP always froze within the first second or so of getting to the desktop. Even in safemode. (Unlike my previous random freezing, this happened every single time)

So I fell back to my previous BIOS version, and it booted fine. (the second time. first time I experienced a freeze-up of the type that motivated me to do this in the first place)

So is there something in XP's installation that is BIOS Verson specific? In other words, do I have to reinstall my OS after flashing a newer version of BIOS?

[fatboyjim]

I don't think so Troy

In fact, I have NEVER had to reinstall the OS when flashing the BIOS, but granted, I haven't had to flash whilst using XP.

Perhaps as the settings are wiped when you flash, you didn't re-enter all of them correctly?

For the future, you can use a program from www.geocities.com/mbockelkamp

This saves your current set of BIOS Settings to file so you can back them up later (whether this would work between flashes I'm not sure. It's mainly for people who fiddle with the settings

Jim

[HAL9000]

No... you don't need to reload the OS. What might be happening though is the new BIOS is configured a little bit differently than the old one and allocating resources a little bit differently than before and your XP installation isn't liking it. I had that with an old QDI board. When I updated the BIOS, the video card and the SCSI scanner card I had didn't get along as they started sharing the same memory address. The SCSI card only had 6 selectable addresses and I would get things from a no boot to no display. I finally had to go back to the previous BIOS. So you may want to play around with BIOS settings to get it to boot again.

[troysvihl]

Ok, thanks guys.

[troysvihl]

Well, I installed the latest BIOS and then reinstalled XP. Works fine so far. (and by "fine," I mean that it acctually loads. Didn't fix my original problem though)

So it was something in my old XP installation that didn't like the newer BIOS.

[Tuf]

At least the newer bios was telling it something that XP didn't understand compared to it's configuration.

Was it freezing after the desktop appeared or before?

If it was before while the splash screen was still on try letting it sit there for a few minutes and see if it will reconfigure everything to work with the new bios.

Are the crashes random enough you can't link them to anything?

[troysvihl]

Was it freezing after the desktop appeared or before? If it was before while the splash screen was still on try letting it sit there for a few minutes and see if it will reconfigure everything to work with the new bios.

It happened right after the desktop appeared. But now it's moot, since I've reinstalled XP.

Are the crashes random enough you can't link them to anything?

Yeah, they're infrequent. Maybe once a day. And they aren't associated with any one program.

[bailey]

bad ram could do this and other weard things

[troysvihl]

Ugh. I certainly hope that's not the case. I'm using Mushkin, so I think that's unlikely, although not impossible.

Unfortunately, I have no other RAM sticks to check that out. (And if I shell out cash for RAM, I might as well upgrade a number of other things. And if I'm going to do that, I may as well switch to a P4 platform. Vicious cycle.)

Well, my computer froze irreparibly this morning. Right after I installed Nimo's Codec pack. Sigh. I guess I'll have to do another reinstall.