Dead P4PE Mobo. Help!

[DavidA]

Hoping someone here can help.

Yesterday I nuked my P4PE mobo [1] when a bios flash went wrong. I now need to get a new motherboard, unless anyone can tell me differently.

I have a 6600GT AGP graphics card, 768MB of Crucial RAM, a 2.4GHZ P4 (with a Zalman heatsink) and two 200GB drives connected to a RAID card.

I don't want to have to upgrade all my components just because I nuked the motherboard, so can anyone recommend a motherboard which will let me keep the majority of my components? I'd buy a P4PE again, but I'd much prefer to have on-board RAID as the RAID card has caused me no end of problems.

Any help would be appreciated. I've had to downgrade to an old laptop, so finding out information myself is proving hard!

[1] http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4PE&langs=01

[Millennium]

If you can find local support you can send them the mobo serial and your BIOS chip and they should reflash it for you cheap or free. MSI UK for example will do this free (don't quote me on that !).

If not find someone with same mobo and get them to hot-flash your chip with it for you. Good Luck!

PS some mobos now have perma-mounted BIOS flash chips so check that first, i doubt yours does but u never know.

[nimbu]

Doesnt ur original CD have bios recovery??? Even if if its fubared??? IIRC you put the original MB CD in, power up, and press some key combination, and this loads a biod from the CD itself. Worth check imo.

Nim

[DavidA]

Thanks for the replies, particularly since I posted on the wrong forum.

In case someone googles for this later, here's what I found out:

Many Asus motherboards have Crashfree BIOS feature. There are two versions of this, 1 & 2. Version 1, present on 2003 boards, seems to rely on you backing up your mobo bios to floppy and then recovering the bios from floppy in the event of a corruption. In my case, the boot didn't even go looking for a floppy so I couldn't see that working. Version 2, which is present in 2004 and 2005 boards, seems to let you do the same, but with the mobo's installation CD. I could probably have sent my bios for repair, but I don't have that amount of patience.

In the end I worked out that I was fussing about something that cost £70 to replace with a better model. I bought a P4P800-E Deluxe which uses the same RAM and same processor (and fan). Despite compatibility with my existing RAM, I got 1GB of faster RAM for £60.

I was wound up by it at the time, but now I consider it an enforced upgrade