Step 3 : Booting Up With The Boot Disk

Now, let's boot up the hot flash system using the DOS boot disk. For those who have not done this for a long time now, here is a refresher :-

1. Boot up and access the BIOS setup menu.
2. Set the BIOS to boot up using the floppy drive. Usually, that just involves setting the First Boot Device as Floppy.
3. Insert the DOS boot disk into the floppy drive.
4. Reboot the computer and allow it to boot up using the DOS boot disk. You should see something like this :-

Step 4 : Swap The BIOS Chips

This is the time to swap the BIOS chips. You will need to do so with the system still running.

Below is a picture of the good BIOS chip of the ABIT NF7-S, the motherboard we used to hot flash :-

Good BIOS chip in its socket

As mentioned earlier, we only had tweezers to work with so removing the BIOS chip with the system 'hot' was rather dicey. So, we first removed the BIOS chip with the system powered off. Then we seated the BIOS chip in its socket with just enough pressure to keep it in place before booting up. This allowed us to remove the BIOS chip with just a slight flick of a tweezer prong.

If you have a proper BIOS chip removal tool, you don't have to take the above precautions. You can just boot up and then remove the BIOS chip.

BIOS chip removed

Once the good BIOS chip has been removed, take the corrupted BIOS chip and insert it into the socket. Remember to align the notch in the BIOS chip's package with the notch in the socket before you insert the BIOS chip!

Inserting the corrupted BIOS chip

With the corrupted BIOS chip in place, all you need to do now is flash it with a new BIOS image!