Update: This was originally written in 2006. Links are now dead, but hey, you might find this post to be an interesting throwback to decades past.
A bios flash gone bad can kill your bios. Yes, sometimes you can create a boot disk that automatically reflashes it, but sometimes it’s fried.
So what do you do if you’re in this situation? ABIT will send you one for free. Actually, they charge you shipping and handling… Handling is $6, and shipping is $5 ($10 if you live in Canada). If you need it really fast, you can pay more to get 2nd day or next day delivery. But really, almost free is pretty good.
Believe it or not, you also get to pay through Paypal (or with Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover, although still processed through Paypal’s site). Yes, ABIT really does have geeks in mind all the time.
You can order the bios right from ABIT’s own parts store:
US – http://www.abit-usa.com/abitparts/ (Web Archive)
CANADA – http://www.abit-usa.com/abitparts/canada/ (Web Archive)
What’s more, they also offer other miscellaneous parts that might have died (or that you broke), including the following, also free:
- chipset fans
- that fancy metal plate that goes at the back of your computer near the ports
- heatsink holders
- video card cooling fans & other miscellaneous parts
- BIOS chips
I’ve used ABIT products for years, and never knew this information. I accidentally stumbled across it while reading through some forums and figured it’s something worth sharing. If only they’d offered replacement capacitors back in the day when my old KR7A-133R started blowing caps for no reason (other than the fact that many motherboard manufacturers were receiving batches of sub-par capacitors).
For those who’ve had the faulty cap issue, gone to a local electronics store to obtain capacitors that were out of spec but still worked, burned themselves with a soldering iron replacing the caps, and finally repaired the motherboard only to gouge it a couple months later with a screwdriver when removing a cpu heatsink…… I share your pain.
For everyone else who’s only managed to fry a bios, enjoy!