Drive frimware flash problem with AMD 760 chipset

[robtherat007]

Hello,

I have the Board MSI K7D Master -L with the CHipset AMD 760 MPX running with two Athlon MP 2000+.

I have the problem that I cannot flash the firmware of my DVD Burner (NEC 3500). No matter what firmware and what flashsoftware I use (unoffical and official) it looks like the flashsoftware cannot write. It is possible to dump the current firmware of the drive to file though.

I suppose its the board that causes this problem. Can you think of any setting in the BIOS of the board or anything else that I should do to make it work ?

[Matth]

Microsoft IDE driver, or AMD ?
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_2336~4512,00.html

In Win98SE, I've always used the AMD IDE driver, and found it 100% compatible - not sure if the 2002 driver is an improvement on the current Microsoft SP revisions though (it covers all versions, but is only WHQL'd for 2k/XP).

I'd combine it with the appropriate other drivers ... hol;d on, I'll look up the board, as I'm thinking a "FULL" AMD chipset, and it may be a half and half with VIA southbridge.

Full AMD
http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/motherboards/1171_2.html
762 Northbridge (RAM, CPU, AGP, PCI-66) and 768 Southbridge (IDE, PCI-33, USB, AC97 & legacy ports support)

[robtherat007]

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors...36~4512,00.html that one is already installed. Should I uninstall it ?

I will try ... Please hold on ...

Yes ! That was it it seems. After uninmstalling eide amd drivers, I am able to flash the bios of my NEC 3500 using 218btrpc1.bin and NECWinFlash.exe. Now that brings me to 3 new questions :

1. Why wasn't I able to flash when my windowxp sp2 was in safe mode (shouldn't that drive have been inactive in safe mode) ???

2. Why wasn't I able to flash wehn booting with a dos 6.3 boot floppy disk ? (shouldn't that drive have been inactive when booting to dos, or is ther something persistent in some chip) ???

3. What drivers should I use from now on? Since I won`t flash again too soon I could reinstall those amd eide drivers. But then again, it looks like they haven't been uptated since 2002 (as link above states). And I am running winxp sp2 ....

[Matth]

Safe mode (XP) may not be deep enough to cut out the offending driver, or may be too deeply trimmed for the windows flash to work.

DOS Mode, real DOS boot disk - a DOS flasher should work, unless you are missing a required driver (but it's BIOS supported IDE) or have something present that the flash program doesn't like (some are incompatible with EMM386).

What to use?
Well assuming it reads and writes ok with the AMD, I'd benchmark both choices with HDTach, and favour the Microsoft one if they are about equal in speed and CPU usage.

[chef]

Using a bootdisk. USB drive or plain DOS-partition should avoid the problems.

The CPU itself has nothing to do with it.