When A Flash Goes Wrong

If you see any error messages, do NOT reboot your system! If you reboot, you may see garbage or even nothing on screen! Because, without a working BIOS, your card will not work properly.

Although it is not common if you take precautions, this can happen if the BIOS image you downloaded is corrupted or if the floppy disk is faulty.

What you should do now is flash your old video BIOS back into the Flash ROM. That should restore your graphics card back to normal.

However, if the worst happens and the card fails due to a corrupted BIOS, you will need to use a PCI graphics card to boot up and reflash the dead BIOS.

Just plug in both the PCI and 'faulty' AGP graphics cards into the system. Attach the monitor cable to the PCI graphics card. Then boot up the computer.

If your system does not boot, it is probably because the Primary Display option in the BIOS was set to AGP. You will need to unplug your AGP card, boot into the BIOS and set this option to PCI. After that, plug your "faulty" AGP card back to your system. Now your system should boot with the PCI graphics card as the primary display card of your system.

Then, repeat steps 1 and 3 to reflash the 'faulty' graphics card. You can do so either with the original BIOS image or a new BIOS image. This time your AGP card should be the second graphics card of your system and the PCI card should be the first.

Please note that if you are booting up using an ATI PCI graphics card, you need to replace the "0" (zero) with "1" when you are flashing the AGP card. Otherwise, leave it at "0".