A few weeks ago an old Athlon PC running Win2k with some custom software (written in an old version of Delphi) which talks to a special PCI interface card crapped out. The USB interface apparently went wonky.

So I dragged out another old PC with an Athlon 64 chip on an Asus A8V motherboard to do an "upgrade" and get things running again. I wanted to be able to make sure it was updated, so I upgraded the disk from Win2k to WinXP-SP3 then installed Win7 on an SSD (the Win7 installer won't run unless XP or later is present). I had to have the SATA interface card driers handy on a floppy during the XP install (it has to be a floppy). I then fought with Windows Update to run, but eventually seemed to be Ok. Eleventy-seven updates were installed. Reboot.

And, it hangs.

So I figure the BIOS needs to be updated. Easy, peasy.

But, of course, the BIOS programs are designed to run from DOS, which means building a DOS boot floppy. All the floppies I could find were about 20 years old, so finding a decent one was a challenge. Then finding a USB floppy drive. Then finding the right latest BIOS and flashing program.

I couldn't get the BIOS to get out of "initializing USB devices.." to actually get into the BIOS to change the boot order. So, I fought with that for a while and discovered that I could get into the BIOS if I removed the 2032 battery, but then, of course, any changes wouldn't be saved with the battery removed so it would hang again on rebooting.

None of the BIOS flashing programs would work - something seems to be scrambled in the BIOS. I eventually ordered a new BIOS chip on eBay (but still haven't received it yet - I guess it's coming Pony Express).

I decided to try another motherboard as I know that Via chipsets have had problems over the years. I found an old A8N-SLI system with a dual core Opteron. Installed XP on a HD, updated to Win7, fixed Windows Update hanging issues, and everything seems Ok. But it hangs when the Crucial SSD is plugged in. So, I need to update the BIOS. This motherboard has ASUS utilities to "live update" things, but nothing is found to update under Win7. Other Windows BIOS utilities crash because they want to write to some verboten area under Win7. So, I need to do the DOS boot again.

I eventually found "Rufus" which writes a bootable DOS-clone to a USB stick. Copied the AwdFlash and bios.bin files to it, and reboot. And it boots to Win7.

Go in the BIOS again and look for USB boot first. And don't find anything under "removable drives". It's under Hard Drives (WTF)? Change the boot order there, save, reboot. And it boots to DOS!!11

And I can run the flash utility!!1

And it works !!!11

Shut down, connect SSD data cable. Boot Win7. And it works!!11 And it installs the Crucial SSD driver automatically!!11 And Acronis True Image (shipped with the SSD) clones the drive!1111

Shut down, change the boot order in the HDs in the BIOS, reboot, look in Disk Management to see that C: is the SSD. Correct!

Woot!!111

It's a good think I was taking "vacation" to do most of the fighting with these old things - I'd hate to see what the total cost was if I had to bill someone for the time...

I hate Windows... ;-)

Lesson learned: Update the BIOS and drivers before trying to install later versions of Windows.

Cheers,
Scott.